Alrighty, so here’s my issue.
My group and I are a bunch of students that are creating a game for a project in our class. None of us have a whole lot of experience with UE4 - or any game engine, for that matter. We're still learning the ropes. Our programmers are doing a lot of the game's features through hard C++, and utilize blueprints as seldom as they can afford to. Our current problem is with our "interactables." These are meshes that we have scattered throughout the levels that perform animated functions when "used" (i.e. a mouseclick, or pushing the E key). The meshes are skeletal, as we aren't aware of any way to import an premade animation (exported from 3DSMax rather than position manipulation in-engine like Matinee) into the engine with a static.
I'll use our door as an example. The door contains several moving parts that are all linked to each half that swivel, slide away, etc. All of these were linked and animated in 3DSMax and then brought into the engine as Animation Sequences. Meanwhile, the programmers have given the door several states that it can enter into. Open, closed, jammed, etc. There are animations for each of these states, but this is where we're having issues. We cannot for the life of us figure out how to get the doors to animate when "used" (clicked on). The animation sequences preview flawlessly, and we even ended up creating an Animation Blueprint with the separate states playing their own animations. Everything on that end is solid. The animations play perfectly, the mesh stays together where it should; no linkage issues. We simply don't know how to get the animations for the door to activate and play in the game when previewed.
So far, every tutorial we've come across regarding doors, assumes they're going to be animated using matinee. Matinee seems like a horribly inefficient method for getting an elaborate, multi-stage door with a bunch of miniature moving bits on it to act accordingly, so those tutorials have proven irrelevant. Likewise, each tutorial we've found for animating skeletal meshes assumes that we're trying to animate a humanoid. It ends up diving into things that wouldn't apply to our door, due to the control method and number/style of animations.
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. :(