Matinee or Animations BP

Development Character & Animation
1

So it is pretty confusing whether or not to entirely use matinee or the animation BP to animate an entire scene. I m making a game which starts with a 13s matinee cutscene of showing wt the player is doing. Then, Character A comes into the scene and play custom animation (with lip sync n blending). After that, the player plays custom animation, Character B comes in with custom animation and then player regains control. It is a bit like the MatineFight Scene Example of Unreal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO0k92iVMjE but just that it is not entirely cinematic since there is a the player here, and it needs animation blending (lip sync, blinking) via the animation BP on all of the characters, which is probably impossible to do it only in matinee. If I use animation BP to animate every character, I am not sure how to make the animations of Character A and B not immediately play at game start.

Suggestions?

2

For what you’re attempting I’d suggest a combination of both. Typically your characters are pretty much always animating, you just set up an ‘idle’ animation for when they are doing nothing. You create a state machine to determine how your character should be animating according to the state it’s in (i.e. walking, jumping, standing still). Hit the learn tab on the homepage and basically skim through the animation stuff, all the tools are awesome and most are even useful. The better your overview of the whole ecosystem the easier it is to make design choices that dont bite you in the butt. When it comes to implementation specifics you always have the documentation to refer to and community but finding support is much easier if you have a little more knowlege and a specific problem. GLHF