Hi! I am a newbie Unreal Engine user here and currently learning on how to create an ArchViz scene where I can walk around and open and close doors and windows.. I am asking for some help on how to create buttons for an animation made outside of Unreal Engine (in my situation, 3Ds Max). I’ve been researching for the whole day but I haven’t encountered a single one who is in the same situation as me where the animated objects are Actors and not SkeletalMeshActors. I made these Windows and Folding/Sliding doors animations in 3ds Max with all the same timeline frames (0-120). I used a dummy as a helper object that I used to link with the doors and windows to use for animation in transforms and rotation resulting for all the doors and windows to open in sync.
I then exported it using Datasmith Exporter Plugin and put it to ‘Active Time Segment’
as a result my 3D files imported into Unreal Engine and the animations are separate and is an object called “Level Sequence”.
I then double click the file and it applies into the scene. The Dummy helper objects that I created in 3Ds max became several different Actors where the doors and windows are linked to.
Here is what the Sequencer looks like for the dummy actors:
and this is what the sequencer looks like for the objects (Doors and windows) linked to the dummy actors generated by Datasmith:
This is a video showing how it looks like in the unreal editor and how it moves.
HowToPlayActorAnimationWithButtonPresss.mkv (17.1 MB)
As you can see in the video, when I play the animation every door and window is in sync because the animated dummies are all animated in the same frames. I want to be able to separate these animations in unreal engine, or are they already separated? I don’t really know as I am very unfamiliar with the sequence editor since I’ve only started learning Unreal for a week. In my mind I want to separate these animations and make them be able to be interacted with in first person mode (open and close by playing the animation using a blueprint and reversing the animation). The problem is I do not understand how I would start making such blueprints when all the tutorials I see are either with skeletal actors or animated directly in Unreal Engine. I am also unable to select the main Actor (dummy) in the blueprint even as Skeletal Actor.
How do I create a button where the animation for an individual actor animation (not all) is played on key-press either in forward/reverse (for open and close).
Do I need to separate each animation and export them one-by-one to work? That would be super time consuming if so but I am ready to do so if that is the case. If that is not the case, how do I put the main dummy actors that is linked with my geometry in the blueprint section? I’ve been trying to put it in for the whole day sadly.. without any results.
Hoping anybody has knowledge on this, thank you for reading 
– Update –
I’m giving up on this idea for the time being, from non-stop research, it seems impossible to create start and stop switches for individual imported animations that has non-skeletal mesh actor controllers with geometries linked to it (a dummy/empty object).