Issue with Sync Group and montage blend in

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hello,

While working on the locomotion on our project, we noticed that syncs group were not working in some specific cases.

Currently, we are splitting the locomotion in three steps:

  • Start montage which is using motion warping
  • Cycle Locomotion which is a blendspace looping while following capsule velocity
  • Stop montage which is also using motion warping to ensure the final position of the character

However, by doing so we noticed that footsteps would sometime be broken while transitioning from cycle to stop montage, even though we have sync marker in both animation assets.

Looking at the documentation for sync markers here

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/animation-sync-groups-in-unreal-engine

It is said that montages support sync markers only when blending out. Since in our case we want to have sync marker while blending in montage, do you have any clues for us to make it work?

Cheers,

2

Hi, how straightforward this would be to support depends on your requirements, so it’d be useful to get some more information.

The default behaviour with montages is that they are always leaders in any sync group. If you’re ok with that for the case when blending into the montage, what you could do is set the montage’s initial playback position to a position based on the previous leader’s sync marker position and then play out from there as the leader. So on the frame the montage became active, you would see it’s initial playback position synchronized to the graph, and from that point forward the montage would play and the graph would be synchronized to it. We already do something similar to this with certain asset player nodes within the anim graph.

If that works for your situation, we can probably provide a shelf with some changes that would allow this to work.

3

Hey,

I think your solution could fit our needs ! If you can provide a shelf that would be even better.

4

Hi Thibault, thanks for the patience on this.

Here is a version of PlayMontage that, if possible, automatically sets its start time to match that of its sync group’s previous leader _before_ becoming the leader itself. I tested it locally but not very thoroughly so you may find you need to do some fixes/patches later on but the main logic is there.

Shelf CL: 45861906

Let me know if you’re able to see the shelf.

Best,

- RM

5

Hello,

Thank you for the shelve, unfortunately we don’t have permission to see it. Is there another way for us to get it ?

Cheers,

Thibault Pawlak

6

Hi, can you give 45874857 a try? That’s a cherry pick of the previous changes but in the UE5/Main branch so you should have access. If there are still problems I can send you a patch.

7

Hello, 45874857 worked ! We will integrate the changes and i’ll let you know how it goes. Thank you for the help !

Cheers,

Thibault Pawlak

8

Hello, a small update on this, we just integrated the changes in our project & it works perfectly! Thank you again for the shelve & the help.

Cheers,

Thibault Pawlak

9

Great, thanks for letting us know!