I made a simple spell casting animation sequence that I want an enemy character to use but I can’t seem to get it to work.
I’ve looked at a million tutorials and they all are like “here’s what you do” but don’t explain why in a lot of cases, and since my little animation doesn’t really match up with what they’re doing, I’m getting lost pretty quickly.
I don’t know why I would need an animation montage, animation blueprint, or a blend space, and some tutorials use them and some. I am struggling to understand why I would need one over the other, or if I need to use them in conjunction with one another. I didn’t know how to incorporate a “play montage” in the enemy blueprint since all the logic is in shield blueprint that doesn’t have a character mesh.
In my set up, I have a shield effect that activates on and off; I just want the little casting animation to play once each time.
I would just like something to show/teach me how to make a little animation play, then go back to being idle (or transition into another animation which is what I’m assuming the blend space is for)
It sounds like what you need is an animation blueprint to switch between animation states. Can you give us a bit more specifics on where you are struggling? In the meantime, check out this non-Epic affiliated beginners guide on animation blueprints:
I’m confused as to why I would need an animation state though. I just want a small animation to play when an event triggers. I seems like animation states are just for things like standing or running where the animation loop plays over and over. I just want it to play once.
I thought that’s what montages were for, but I can’t seem to get it to work. I have two blueprints that I think are relevant; the enemy bp and the shield bp. All the logic for the shield activating/deactivating is in the shield bp and is attached to the location of the enemy.
if I create a custom event in enemybp and have it set to play a montage, I can’t call it in shieldbp because I’ll get an error with the target, and I can’t create the montge in shieldbp because i cant connect it to the enemy’s skeletal mesh.
edit: Video was helpful, but not in the way I need. I have watched other tutorials that show how to do similar things, but I’m not concerned with running/walking/falling animations at the moment, so I feel like I can come back to this resource when I’m working on that stuff.
Your animation blueprint is what everything else is built upon. It covers more than just looping animations as well, and is used for everything from waling and running, to jumping, attacks, emotes, etc. Maybe you can give us more specifics about what your animation is. Is the shield moving and animating instead of the character’s arm holding the shield?
Seems like the issue your facing has more to do with Blueprint Communication rather than Anim Montages.
If you could share more details/screenshots of how the shield is created and attached to the enemy, it’ll be easier to provide a solution.
Details like, do you spawn the Shield BP at runtime or is it already attached to the Enemy BP in editor? And screenshots of the custom event playing the anim montage, calling the custom event from the Shield BP etc…
This is the tutorial I am following. At 27:51 is where his animation plays to deactivate the shield. I’m trying to do something similar, but on shield activate instead.
He has a “holding shield up” looping animation, whereas I don’t. He didn’t need to go in and mess with the blend space or whatever just to add in the animation here. He only went in to edit the animation blueprint to include the holding shield up animation.
I ended up figuring out the problem a while ago, so I thought I would update.
The “Switch on Name” node had the Default pin that needed to be changed. I had to add a pin for the correct name (which had to match the animation montage’s notify)
