It seems, that currently, Matinee can have animation tracks only for groups that have SkeletalMeshActor. It’s impossible to have animation track when there’s ACharacter in the group. When I try to add anim track to group where there’s ACharacter-derieved actor, nothing happens.
It also seems, that this limitation was carried over to Sequencer.
This bit us, when we tried using Matinee to animate some intro sequence. We couldn’t directly fire animations on our character; only via event track, which is awkward, and doesn’t support nice previewing.
(Side question for Epic cinematics guys - how do you make cinematics that drive player character? Do you switch ACharacter-based actor to some ASkeletalMeshActor-based thing for the time of cinematic and hide player character?)
So, the most flexible solution would be to add possibility to add Animation track to any SkeletalMeshComponent, whether it resides in SkeletalMeshActor or not, that simply overrides any current animation of this component:
(somewhere in this menu)
I’d love to see that too. The best workaround I have for now is to use the Float Anim BP Parameter Track to drive alpha blending of animation clips in the animation blueprint. A little easier in my opinion than event tracks, but still no preview in Matinee and just not as efficient as animating skeletal animations.
Anywhere we can vote on this feature (I didn’t see it on Trello)?
We’ve been using a SkeletalMesh of our player for the cinamtics, switching out the ACharacter. The problem of course is that the player isn’t just one mesh… there’s the weapon, perhaps some armor and whatnot. You have to replicate all of that in the skeletal mesh you use for cinematics, so yeah it’s absolutely not convenient right now.
A bit off a tangent, but mesh emitters in particles have the same limitation and it’s just as frustrating.
Let me add my voice to the request; I’ve just run into this limit myself. Real shame because there’s some great stuff you can do whilst making an film/animation with a game engine (i.e. sound, anim blueprint/ik etc) that currently can’t be done - or at least previewed - in sequencer/matinee. Here’s hoping we see it soon!
