Why do animation constraints in the sequencer constantly break?

Development Character & Animation
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1

I have been animating in Unreal for my job for the past few weeks and it has honestly been terrible. I’m not new to UE but the constraints constantly break, to the point that half of the animation I’ve done is irrelevant now. It seems like any little thing I do, the engine just decides to randomly undo.

Every time I add a constraint, I have to close the sequencer, zero out the location of the object, and delete the constraint from the animation tab (this is to ensure the constraint only applies inside the designated sequence). Then open the sequence and pray the object is still constrained. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.

When I open up other sequences, constrained objects will be randomly missing. Then I have to redo all my work.

This parenting system seems far too buggy / complex for sequencer shots that require no physics and no coding or gameplay. All I am trying to do is parent objects to other objects, but it is a massive headache and seems to only work half the time. Working this way feels like it takes five times longer than it should.

If I was dealing with 1 or 2 sequences, this constraint system might be okay, but we are working with multiple sequences and objects that constantly have to attach / detach from other objects.

I hate to complain but I truly don’t know what to do at this point. Dealing with this has been awful, and most of my issues seem more like software bugs than user error. We are using 5.2.1 and aren’t currently able to upgrade, so if there are fixes in newer versions, I don’t have access to them.

2

Sorry I can’t offer any solutions. We have run into the same issue. It started when we tried to copy and paste elements that were constrined in one sequence, working fine, and paste them into another sequence. It appeared to work great. But returning to the sequences latr and those elements have “undefined” constraints.

Contributing to this may be that it does warn that the object being contrained to is not spawnable (it’s in the level and has an animated track in the sequence).

So now we have a bunch of objects at the origin that I wish we could “snap” back into place by re-establishing the constraint without the current offset. No dice, just flies off into who know where.

Alternatively it would be great to edit the “undefined” constraint to redefine the parent/target. But there seems no posibily of editing the constraint after it’s creation?