Hello,
I’m working on a complex cinematic including motion capture animations and the likes. I experience a very strange error.
My whole cinematic is edited in Matinee and if I move the time bar around or hit play in Matinee, everything works as expected. But when I do a PIE, some of my mocap animations don’t launch.
I have absolutely no clue where this might come from. Thanks for any insight and / or help.
Hello and thanks for your reply Stitched!
Unfortunately I know this is not the source of the problem. My Matinee is set to Play On Level Load and almost everything works as expected. So far I have spotted 2 animations that don’t fire at all from Matinee while in PIE. All the others (something like 70 keys of animations, movements, FOVs and the likes - plus the Director group) work as expected.
Hi,
You need to set it up to play in the Level Blueprint like so:
If you have camera cuts, you need to create a Director Group and add “keys” to it’s track to define where the cuts occur and what camera to switch to. Adding this code to your level will force the viewport to use Matinee on Play.
Are the animation tracks ticked (small box on left of track)? Do keys appear on their tracks? When you view the track through the curve editor, are there changed in animation curves or a series of constant keys?
Everything is in check. Here is a screenshot of my setup: Camera40 is attached to a joint on Camera4 so that it follows its animated root.
It all works if I only preview it using Matinee’s playback controls - editor cuts, Camera4 moves and Camera40 follows, FOV works as expected.
But if I play in editor, while editor track and Camera40’s FOV are correct, Camera4’s animation doesn’t play - making Camera40’s feed completely static.
I’m bumping this because I really need a solution. Re-making my scene and / or my matinee is out of the question because deadline is too short and frankly that’s over 70 tracks to redo.
What does the Director track contain?
What if you added another track/subtrack under the Director for Camera4’s animation only?
The Director switches from one camera to the other depending on which one is required - pretty standard configuration which is used in the Matinee demo project.
I cannot have more than one Director track as only one at a time can be active.
So the Director track that is there already contains camera information (prior cuts) but doesn’t contain Camera4 ? Or it DOES contain Camera4 (the light green bar) ? Is there a reason the movement track for Cam4 is empty (except for one key) but the Anim track has a bar on it?
The Director has no incidence on animations or movements: it only directs which camera feed is the main one at the time. It contains a reference to Camera40 because that’s a Camera Actor. It doesn’t contain a reference to Camera4 because that’s a Skeletal Mesh to which Camera40 is attached. This is the setup I received from animation.
Camera4 and Camera40’s Movement tracks are mostly empty because all I want is to make sure they are at 0;0;0 so that all other animations blend smoothly and it goes correctly with the environment.
The Movement track is NOT what animates Camera4! It is its Animation track, which moves Camera4 correctly in Matinee but not in PIE.
Reminder: I am working on a complex cut-scene comprising of ~50 imported FBX animations and currently featuring over 12 different camera placements and movements. Two of my FBX animations don’t work. But, oddly enough, exclusively outside of Matinee: they don’t work in PIE, or Matinee video export, but work well when trying them by playing with the trackline or playing in Matinee, or in asset preview.
First is a character and because of incredibly strict NDA I can’t show neither name, picture or anything about it. Its first animation is at fault here and the weirdest part is that it used to work until fairly recently. I have absolutely no idea what change could have caused it to stop working, as nothing changed it directly in a while.
I did notice however that if I forced Start position on my Matinee actor in the scene to approximately the time when my character should be visible, its animation did start correctly.
Second is a camera, the only one whose animation comes from an FBX file. So there’s a skeletal mesh of a cone with the animation, and a camera is childened to it. That’s the setup for which I have given a Matinee screenshot. In this case my Director cuts to the appropriate camera without problem, but the container’s animation never plays out.
For whatever reason, this doesn’t appear to be fixed by forcing start position to either the beginning or the middle of this animation: it just never works. Except when trying it out that is.
I end up with the double problem that I stuff doesn’t work, but worse than that I can’t even find a way to observe the faulty behaviour, as everything works as expected in “debug” setups.
I really need an answer from someone knowledgeable on this. I couldn’t find any related problem, let alone one that was answered. Nobody around me has any clue about this or time to dig much. Deadline is approaching fast and re-making my Matinee would take too much time for unguaranteed results.
Ok so it seems that there are two different issues, with one being fixed for the moment.
The camera container not animating was due to the fact that I had set its render to be Hidden In Game. I can see the rationale behind not animating something invisible, however I really miss that there is not an explicit setting or even warning that this is the case - as there is in Unity. So I’m settling this by making the ugly debug mesh visible and I’ll work around that.
For the other case, my character not visible, I still have no clue as of the source of the problem. It used to work, it works in Matinee and in Matinee Movie rendering, so that’s enough for me for now. But I’m very disappointed that nothing has surfaced about that.
I’ve run into this as well working on complex cinematics, it’s baffling.
There are two things that have fixed issues for me, the first is making sure there’s enough time for it to load, so setting extra time as a buffer.
And the main one being, if you select the animated mesh in the viewport, it probably no longer has the animation assigned to it, so under transform in the Animation section, under “Anim to Play” make sure it’s assigned. And if that doesn’t work delete the matinee track, and redo it.
Good luck, hope this helps.
I just skipped through the posts here but i couldnt see anyone mentioning this: Have you tried setting Mesh Component Update Flag in Details panel of the mesh under Skeletal Mesh section to Always Tick Pose and Refresh Bones? This option should fix the problem when the skeletal mesh starts playing another animation while not rendered.
Thanks you also solved my problem :*
Thank you Mr Jacky.
thank you! you solve my issue as well. I set up a blueprint with a lot of optional meshes and for some reason the animation was playing fine in editor but was stuck to a first frame while in play mode. ticking that checkbox solved my issue.
