I downloaded the animation starter pack which comes with a bunch of new animations that you can use with your default character. But there are no instructions with the pack as to how to add them? do i have to watch the video tutorials on animation all over again, because honestly the number of videos one has to watch to animate a character, well is too much to watch again. i guess im suffering video tutorial fatigue because there is no documentation for this. anyway to shorten my question can someone briefly explain to me how I can add the animation starter pack animations to my character and how to have them play by , for example, pressing a key?
If you open up the animation pack you downloaded as a separate project, you should be able to right click in the content browser and “migrate”. It will ask you for a content directory of another project. it will also auto-import any assets referenced within the item you are trying to migrate 
Hope this helps, and good luck with your project.
Thanks AquaGames. Including what I meant by add, I meant how to add the animations because they don’t come with blueprints or anything like that to trigger the animation.
I’m assuming you mean the animations are included, but theres no script to trigger them?
Theres a “play animation” node, attach it to whatever sequence of code requires it and choose the required animation fro the drop-down on the node; Theres a lot of documentation on animations. including how to make them and how to implement them.
Read up Good luck with your project
Aqua games, I’ve looked through all the links and I still can’t find documentation on pressing a button causing a certain animation to play. its one of those “show the trees, but the forest isn’t important”. For example in one if its documentations it says "Playback of Animation Sequences can be performed through code, but is generally handled within an instance of an Animation Blueprint applied to a SkeletalMeshComponent. And then that part that I’ve italicized is ignored.That is found on this page Animation Sequences in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.2 Documentation Why would they say that something could be done, but then not discuss it? Maybe Im used to Unity documentation which is pretty much to the point. For simple topics pages and pages of theory are written, and that a brief vague example is shown that can only be done in a very specific condition. . From what I’ve been reading so far, it seems to assume you know how to do it. I can’t find a straight forward documentation that shows you how to tie a key or button press , to an animation. The writers written what can be done to animations, and how to mix many animations, retargeted, etc but Unreal hasn’t documented the most basic way, ie tie a button to an animation. You suggested the “play animation” node, but there are different types of this like “play animation (mesh)” or ones that will only play a montage. Honestly its driving me crazy and I hope you can help me. I don’t want to blend animations or do anything fancy. I just want to hit a specific key, and have that tied to an animation. If you could filter out all theory they discuss and show me I would be greatful!
I’m not entirely sure on what your end goal is, and so I don’t know how best to advise you, but I’ll give it a shot.
If you right click in your blueprint and look under Key Events or Mouse Events, you will see…, see example below.
As you can see from the second image, the play animation (mesh) has 3 input pins. One is the animation (complete with dropdown to make your life easier) and the second is target. This simply means the mesh that the animation should be attached to/affect. The third is whether or not the animation should loop. (This will be based on the value of a Boolean.)
The play anim montage is for multiple animations that are tied together, for instance if your character has a beam spell which lasts for as long as the button is pressed, there would be 3 main parts to it. The first part would be your character moving from the idle stance, to the position he is in when casting the beam, the second part would be the beam, and the 3rd part would be your character moving back into the idle stance.
Using Anim Montage means you can repeat step 2 for as long as the click is held, before continuing the animation to end the sequence.
More information can be found here, and this would work something like this
I hope this was of some use to you
AquaGames, I’m glad you posted this so I can clarify my problem. Lets say I am importing the AnimStarter pack to an existing third person bluperint template. The problem is that it seems that you can’t add new animations to the existing character controlled by the 3rd person animation asset with the Play Animation Node that you are showing above. For example if you use PlayAnimation as you did above it will not show the correct animation, and the character does like a wierd stand and raises his shoulders. The only way I could seem to get it to work as you have done is when I select the ThirdPersonCharacter in the World outliner, and change the Skeletal Mesh from one SK_Mannequin to another SK_Mannequin that appears there, it has the exact same name. The problem then is that your new animation will work, and the existing animations that worked for the default third person character will no longer work, unless you switch the mesh field back to the other SK_Mannequin. Thanks for being patient with me so far, I really appreciate it.
Theres a whole tutorial series I’ve just stumbled across about animating. ART: Getting Started with Animating | 09 | Tutorial Series | Unreal Engine - YouTube
Maybe one of those vids can help you
“Have you added it to the “anim blueprint”?” I’m glad you said that as this allows me to tell you what my original intent was. I wanted to be able to have a key press cause an animation, without having to start or add to a complicated animation graph. I got many answers one being yours, and what had been suggested was the use of the Play Animation node. But as I seem to have demonstrated, this is a broken feature in the Unreal Engine, and cannot be used if other animations are tied to the skeleton. So at this moment this is not possible and I’ve just discovered the documentation that admits to it. On this page (Animation Sequences in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.2 Documentation) it passively states " This means, in order to share animations between multiple Skeletal Meshes, each of the meshes must use the same Skeleton asset." But as I have shown, even if the same skeleton is used this does not apply, as both time I used the default skeleton in Unreal. I hope people don’t waste as much time as I did after being mislead being told that Play Animation is all you have to do. Thanks for being patient with me AquaGames, I am a bit disappointed but at least now I know this feature is not available yet.
Thanks for the link Aquagames, I came across this but I’m not in the business of buying expensive animation software such as Maya. That is why I had originally thought that I could get animations from the Unreal Engine Market and since the same skeleton was used, I should have been able to use the “Play Animation”. But as I’ve shown, you can’t, as I’ve just received an email confirming this feature was never meant for a user to simply have his own character for which they could have a simple response system cause animations.
Just my 2c, but Blender is free and has nearly all the same capabilities as Maya.
And it’s free.
And awesome.
… and free 
The thing is I am not interested in making animations, because you can buy them and get them from the market place. But reborngoat oh my god you don’t know how many times I tried and gave up on blender, must have thrown my second monitor across the room 3 or 4 times lol
I use Blender too 
Just be patient The learning process isn’t such a bad experience. Nothing great can ever be achieved without practice and dedication.
Yes you could always just buy animations, but you have less freedom over your content. Unless of course you commission people to make specific things.
Yeah, and even if you buy your animations there’s something to be said for having the skillset to take them into an outside software to tweak them if you need to.