Hi everyone,
I’m facing a frustrating issue with Sequencer and I’m hoping someone can spot what I’m missing. I have a simple Skeletal Mesh (a BB-8 droid) that I want to animate using a Control Rig directly in Sequencer.
The Problem:
When I press Play in Sequencer, the character remains completely static in its bind pose, even though I have keyframes on the Control Rig tracks. If I scrub the timeline, I can see the character correctly posed at each keyframe, but it doesn’t play back the animation.
What I’ve Checked (My Debugging Steps):
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The Rig is Correct: My rig was created in Blender and works as expected. The hierarchy is simple: Root > Body_Bone / Head_Bone.
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The Control Rig Works: I’ve created a Control Rig (CR_BB8) with controls for each bone. If I open the Control Rig editor and manipulate the controls, the preview mesh animates perfectly. This confirms the Control Rig itself is set up correctly.
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Sequencer Setup:
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I’ve created a new, clean Level Sequence.
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I added the Skeletal Mesh actor to the Sequencer.
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I deleted the default Animation track.
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I added the Control Rig track and assigned my CR_BB8 asset. The control tracks (Root_ctrl, body_bone_ctrl, CTRL_head_ctrl) appear correctly.
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Keyframing: I can set keyframes on the control tracks using the ‘S’ key. The keyframes appear on the timeline.
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Troubleshooting I’ve Tried So Far (and didn’t work):
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Setting the actor track’s “When Finished” property to Keep State (although this option seems to have been removed/changed in recent versions).
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Re-assigning the actor to the track (Right-click → Assign Actor).
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Changing the Skeletal Mesh Component’s Animation Mode between “Use Animation Blueprint” and “Use Animation Asset”.
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Deleting the actor from the scene and the Sequencer and re-creating everything from scratch.
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Deleting the Intermediate and Saved folders.
I’m using Unreal Engine version [5.6.1].
It feels like I’m missing one final switch to tell the Sequencer to “take over” the actor during playback. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
