Play Skeletal Mesh Animation in Reverse ( Unreal 4.27 )

Development Character & Animation
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Hi

I cannot belive I haven’t found a better solution to this already.
So I’m trying to make an efficient method of playing NON-LOOPING animations forwards and backwards seamlessly while just replacing the animation in the skeletal mesh actor. Or feeding a specific animation into it.

What I want:

  • Easily swap entire animation, but allow forward and reverse playing of animation seamlessly where it reverses from the time its played at, so If i reverse it in the middle, it will reverse from the middle and not from the end of the animation.

Here is what I don’t want:

  • I don’t want to know the length of the animation or code this in somewhere.
  • I don’t want to have one normal and a seperate reverse animation.
  • I don’t want Animation Blueprints, only animation directly from a Skeletal animation, Anim montage can be accepted.

In Unity, for instance, simply setting -1 on the playrate will automatically start it from the end… Why doesn’t Unreal do this?

This is the best way i’ve found to do what is described:

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image1348×409 109 KB

But do we really need 3 entire nodes to do this simple thing? Widget Animations can do all this automatically with one node, where you can select “Reverse” or “PingPong” playback. Why is this to under developed, even for 4.27?

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Within the animgraph make a statemachine with the playerate set to -1 and toggle the state to get it to play out the animation in reverse.
Bonus; you can likely expose the play rate pin and feed it a variable.

If you need a way to do it for montage, then make a custom montage function that supports/handles whatever it needs to.

If you are happy with what you have, but want to paste less stuff… convert it to a macro and use the macro…

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