I’ve been having trouble figuring out how Matinee works in Rocket since the documentation about implementation is incomplete. Here are my general points of confusion:
How do I create a new Matinee?
How do I add the Matinee to my level?
How do I connect an actor in my scene to a track in the Matinee editor?
How do I set whether or not a movement track is World-Relative or Absolute?
How can I blend multiple Anim Control Tracks. In UE3 it depended on a special setup in the Anim Tree and the Actors had to be Matinee Actors… but neither of these things exist in Rocket as far as I can tell.
How do I make a Matinee play on level start?
I need to add another question that goes to the heart of the differences in matinee from UE3 to UE4.
I was able to attach a mesh to a track in Matinee, but when I tried to attach that same mesh to a different matinee I got an error. It was common practice in UE3 to re-use meshes and cameras across multiple matinees, or even use the same mesh on 2 concurrent matinees, just affecting different kinds of tracks. In UE4 this seems to be disallowed. Why?
Hi Jason,
I know you have already received some answers from here and the forums (thanks Henrik), but for the sake of thoroughness I’ll address each question that I am able to, and then I’ll bring in someone more knowledgeable for the ones I don’t have answers for yet.
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To create a new Matinee: Search for MatineeActor in the Class Viewer or Placement Browser, and drag it into your level. (alternately, create a MatineeData in the Content Browser and add it to your level)
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To add the Matinee to your level: Drag the new Matinee from your Content Browser into your level. Place it anywhere you want to add it as a MatineeActor. Then in the Toolbar click on the Matinee button and choose your specific MatineeActor from the dropdown. This will open Matinee.
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To connect an actor in your level to Matinee: Select the actor in the level, then in Matinee right-click in the Groups list (underneath “All, Camera, SkeletalMeshes”) and select Add New (type) Group. You can use Empty Group if you do not want it to automatically include specific Tracks.
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How to set motion for World or Relative: (need answer)
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How to blend Matinee Anim Tracks: (need answer)
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How to play Matinee at level start: This is done in the Level Blueprint. On Event ReceiveBeginPlay, call the Play function for your MatineeActor.
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Why can an actor not be attached to two or more Matinees?: (need answer)
I hope that helps to begin to explain things for you. As I said, I’ll ask one of our Matinee specialists to take a look at this and answer the questions that I was not able to.
Cheers!
Thanks. I’ll await the other answers. The mutli-track animation question may be the heaviest.
I’d like to expound on “Why can an actor not be attached to two or more Matinees?” I feel like the matinee system is meant to be used differently than it was in UE3, and some of the things I used to make matinees do should be done as blueprint operations instead. Is that an accurate description of the change in methodology, or is matinee just not finished yet?
Why can an actor not be attached to two or more Matinees?
The requirement that an actor can only be controlled by one matinee, will be removed soon. It was put in place to avoid conflicts with controlling the same properties on one actor by more than one matinee at the same time. Controlling the same properties of one actor by two matinees is still a bad idea same as it was in UE3 but we are going to leave it up to the user to decide what they want.
How to set motion for World or Relative:
Relative to Initial was removed when we redesigned how transforms are stored for components. We decided to remove the old implementation as it had some serious problems. For now, you can still keyframe objects relative to another object by using attachments. This way your animated object in matinee will be transformed relative to the parent object you attached to.
How to blend Matinee Anim Tracks
There is no way to automatically blend multiple animations right now. It uses one asset at a time, so no blending between. The plan is to support AnimComposite to allow blending between assets and that can be used in Matinee.
I also had trouble figuring out how to create a matinee and still don’t have the ins and outs figured out but the basics are:
Creating a new matinee is no longer done in Kismet, but in the Content Browser - Right click, Miscellaneous, and create a Matinee Data object. Name it, drag it into your level. From the Matinee dropdown in the top UI, your newly created matinee appears, and you can click on it which will open the editor.
(I know you saw my answer on the forum but may as well repeat myself here for the benefit of others).
You can add a matinee much easier by searching for matinee in the placement browser and adding it into your level. It will create everything for you. Soon there will be a way to add a new matinee from the dropdown in the toolbar. The method of creating a matinee data from the content browser is only really needed if you plan to share the data (keyframes, curves, tracks) across multiple matinees.
Is it possible to have the level blueprint send an event when the matinee ends?
Hello,
This is a question from the beta version of the engine. We are marking this answered for tracking purposes. If you are experiencing an issue similar to this please post a new question.
Thank you.