How to run large numbers of animation assets in sequencer without keyframing each

Development Cinematics & Media
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Hello! I am working on an archvis project where I want to have a good deal of animated background people. Is there any way to have a large number of skeletal meshes play their assigned animation asset without adding each one to the sequencer and assigning an animation?

I’d love it if they all simply played the assigned animation asset in place similar to how they work if I begin play.

Maybe there is a way I have not found to call an event that triggers them all? There are a lot of different meshes and different animation assets for each.

Thanks for any help or tips if I am approaching this wrong.

2

Watch this (and search for more organized tut on those topics):

Or just search for:
“contextual animations” “state trees”

This tut (that i gave link above) explains everything oyou need, however it is chaotic and quite hard to follow.

With contextual anims you can split all stuff into anims for separate objects, so (like in tut), bench can have sitting, idle and standing up anims. then you can put that contextual component on every bench that needs it. You can do it with doors, birds, cat dogs, food stands. So each state tree will be local to object, not in every single character.

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Hi, thanks for that. I will look into it! Is this something that can play in a level sequence? It seems that he turns on simulation to get it working.

That’s been my biggest problem is most of the ways Ive seen to do this don’t work when recording a sequence camera fly thru.

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So you want use sequencer but not use sequencer.

Not sure if this will work, but:

  • you can make data asset that holds soft reference to sequence
  • then load that data asset to variable, and play in sequencer
  • then all you need to do is duplicate data assets, swap which sequence they point to

You can also automate generating data assets with some editor tool widget (or event)
It can be done in a way when you select multiple sequences and run script it generates separate data asset for each sequence.

When this works you can generate json script that keeps relation of actor to data asset to sequence.
And another that just loads it all.

I think data assets are easiest to use way for assigning sequences to tags, or skeletal meshes names. You need to have some method of setting correlation between sequence and skeletal mesh. And best would be just TAG, or even better skeletal mesh asset name.