Looping Skeletal Mesh animation Sequences

[Matt3D]

I have several Skeletal Mesh animations that do not loop - and would prefer to find an in-engine solution rather than having someone edit the animations in a DCC like Maya.

In Unity there is a “Loop Pose” checkbox on imported skeletal mesh animations that basically lerps between the end of the animation and the start of it.
To quote one of their devs

Keep in mind that loop pose need to do some magic to make your clip loop if they are not already looping, we compute the difference between the start and stop frame and then distribute this delta over the length of the clip so that why you see some small difference between loop pose on or off.

I feel like this should be possible inside of Unreal engine, something like making a Pose Asset of the first frame of the animation and blend/lerping it over time as the animation reaches its end.
My attempts to figure it out myself have not been sucessfull.

[L.F.A]

Hi there,

Please check the animation editor, there’s an option to create looping animations via interpolating start and end frames.

Go to Asset, Add Looping Interpolation.

Animation Sequences

I don’t have my computer here, I’ll see if I can find a good tutorial.

[Matt3D]

Thanks, I did find this option however all it appears to do is add the first frame again as a single frame at the end of the animation - which I can’t see how it would help unless the animation is already loopable.

There is a workflow using Pose Assets where you can keyframe blend between poses to create new animations… I was hoping I could use this to blend from the imported animation data into a pose… but it appears to only be set up to blend between poses.

[Matt3D]

I found a workflow that helps smooth out animations that don’t loop - not perfect but better than a hard snap.

1. Create an skeleton anim notify keyframe for each animation when you want the loop point to start
   

   

2. Inside the event graph of the animation blueprint, flip flop a boolean
   

3. In the Anim graph, use a blend poses by bool node to blend between two of the same animations
   

[L.F.A]

This is a great idea. Fantastic workflow.
On top of that, you can use the animation blueprint to record that blended transition and create a new file. Doing that way, you won’t need to use notifies.

Good work.