How to play animations by code?

Development Character & Animation
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1

I after a created a Pawn Class and set up movement, I was wondering how to go about applying my animations to each specific direction of movement, such as walking forward(to play forward animation, ect). What functions/code would I be working with to achieve this? Also, how do I reference my animations through code?

2

Hello ,

Here is a small code snippet. You can try to create the AnimSequence in your character and play it.

Creating of animation:

YourCharacter.h

UAnimSequence *Anim;

class YourCharacter : public ACharacter
{
	...
	
	UAnimSequence *Anim;
	
	...
}

YourCharacter.cpp

...

AMyProject3Character::AMyProject3Character()
{
	...
	
	static ConstructorHelpers::FObjectFinder<UAnimSequence> anim(TEXT("AnimSequence'/Game/Mannequin/Animations/ThirdPersonJump_Start.ThirdPersonJump_Start'"));
	Anim = anim.Object;
	
	...
}

...

Playing animation:

...

bool bLoop = false;
GetMesh()->PlayAnimation(Anim, bLoop);

...

AnimSequence’/Game/Mannequin/Animations/ThirdPersonJump_Start.ThirdPersonJump_Start’ - reference of your AnimSequence from engine.

Hope this helps.

2 Likes
3

Would I specify/call the play animation function in my MoveForward() function. I want the result to be every time the player walks forward, the respective animation play. Would this be the right way to go about achieveing this?

4

You’ll want to make your own state machine. A series of booleans called via tick. If you want a better idea of this download the Paper2D C++ module and give that a look at.

I think it has something like UpdateAnimation();. So from there you can get an idea on how to make this work.

5

OMG, thank you for this. There is zero documentation about doing this in code. The docs say “you can play animations from code” but never actually show how.

6

Look at the top responses here:

and here:

7

For playing UAnimSequence in UE5 you have to do the cast:

UAnimationAsset* AnimationAsset = Cast<UAnimationAsset>(AnimSequence);