Hello,
I’ve come to UE from Houdini and I’m therefore very keen to use procedural workflows as much as possible. Having looked into Blueprints lately, I can see their potential and I’ve already successfully created a bunch of assets this way.
However, I always seem to hit a road block when trying to animate my BP assets using keyframes in Sequencer and then export these animations via the Movie Render Queue. Things look fine when previewed in the editor, but they fall apart once I hit the render button.
Let me show you the type of asset I want to create:
This BP actor was created entirely with Construction Script, all the components are created procedurally, i.e. I can decide via a variable whether I want to have three or thirty meshes arranged around the center and the asset will update accordingly. Here’s a picture of the graph:
This part is easy and I think I’ve got the hang of it.
HOWEVER, I now want to be able to animate this setup, maybe something like this:
Now this works when I preview it in the editor (as you can see from the video above), but I’ve already learned the hard way that Construction Script animations do not render out via the Movie Render Queue. They instead remain static.
I therefore have to apply the animations via the Event Graph. Here is my setup, with a keyframe-able variable to animate the meshes’ offset from the center. I’m using a “Tick” event, to “call” the animation when I’m in “Play mode”.
Everything works as it should. In the editor…
…as well as in “Game Mode”.
But, when I now try to render this via the Movie Render Queue, the animation just ‘explodes’:
Thanks to ClockworkOcean’s help, I already learned that this happens, because I am using the “Add Local Offset” node, which - when using the “Tick” Event, seems to be constantly ‘adding’ to the animation, instead of stopping when the keyframe says so.
This is obviously strange behaviour, since the preview of the animation in the editor’s “Game Mode” looks fine.
I already received some suggestions, like using the “Set Relative Transform” node instead, but that doesn’t work, as it overrides the rotation around the center (which is created on an earlier node) and I need that in order to achieve the ‘circular’ distribution of the meshes.
With the way my BP actor is set up at the moment, I can’t achieve my goal, of a procedurally generated and keyframe-animatable asset that can be rendered out correctly via the Movie Render Queue.
Would anyone on the forum have an idea? That’d be much appreciated 
But it does. What am I doing right or wrong here?