I have three different animations from mixamo and try to get them to play in a sequence. There is zero blending going on if I use animation montage regardless what I do to the Blend in / Blend out time. They just jump from one animation to the next.
Second question, how can I use montages in matinee? I can’t pick them in the animation tracks.
I will post this in the bug section and see whats up.
The blend in / blend out time in the animation montages is doing nothing for me either. It works neither in the Preview nor in-game. Also it doesn’t matter if I use set next section or jump to section BP nodes, the blending just never works.
There is one exception to this: when I loop the first animation in my montage endlessly, the blending works ONCE in-game. After the first loop it breaks and just ignores the blend time and jumps directly to the start of the animation.
I’m using UE 4.5.1 and this is probably a bug, since I can’t see why someone would want that blending behaviour.
Hi veiovis,
The Blend in /Blend out time in a montage refers to the blend at the beginning of the montage and the end of the montage and how they blend with other animated sequences.(ie. “sword swings” or “punches” blending back to a separate “idle” or “run” animation when the Montage is no longer activated by pressing a button per se.) The animations contained within the Montage itself do not blend together. If you wanted animations to blend smoothly between different animations, you would use a blend space.
Thanks for clearing this up. I just need to blend various animations into a sequence. I understand that blend spaces need to be driven by parameters.
How can I simply blend animations once they are done with the next ones? Would this something people do i their modeling software? It is something I needed now repeatedly and my work around is pretty ugly.
I play a matinee with an event track that fires certain events and from the events in the level blueprint I cast to a class blueprint that then changes the parameters in the animation blueprint to modify a state machine.
I was really hoping there would be a more straight forward way to blend animations together.
You do not have to blend your montage animations in your 3D software nor do you need to include your montage as part of your state machine. Instead your montage can be triggered by a variable or event in the Event Graph of your Animation Blueprint. You would only use the “Blend In/Blend out” feature of the Montage to set how fast the animation transitions back to State your character returns to in the State Machine.
For an excellent presentation on this workflow, I recommend you watch the following video series (Introduction to Third Person Blueprint game):
I saw all of those tutorials but all I want is to blend different animations that they play one after another with smooth transitions…
Blend spaces need parameters, state machines have conditions so I was hoping montages could get this job done. Is there any other way to achieve this and simply blend 3 - 4 different animations together based on how long each animation takes?
I pondered this for days now and I dont see a solution in UE 4.
Thank you for helping! The matinee part isnt that important. I just have a boss type enemy jump into the arena. The following is all I want:
I have three different animations that do not fit together if they are not blended. I just want to play each animation and blend to the next one once the previous animation is done playing once.
Boss animation running plays once (3 seconds), boss animation jumping plays once (2 seconds), boss animation flying away plays (u seconds).
Think of it as an animation montage with blending. Nothing else. This is also important because mixamo charges everytime you combine animatioms that you already own to a sequence. So I buy single animations and combine them in UE4 to a whole sequence.
But there seems to be no way to do this properly.
I know by now how to use notifiers and such so all I want to do is what I wrote above.
Sorry veiovis,
I’m a little confused what you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to create a fight scene in matinee, you can download the Matinee Fight Scene from the Marketplace and see how they set up the animations. (ie. You would just play the animations continuously without need for game mechanics.)
On the other hand, if you are trying to set up game mechanics you would not use matinee at all. Instead you would use a State Machine and assign inputs to trigger what state the character is in.
If neither of these are what you are trying to achieve, please describe in detail what you are trying to accomplish. For instance: Press X once, character punches only. Press X twice, character punches then kicks. Press X three times, character punches, kicks, then spins around. (Which in this case would be achieved with a State Machine.)
After realizing that blending in AnimMOntages doesn’t work [as we expected], my solution was to use Animation Blueprint Blend Nodes in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine Documentation in the AnimGraph.
I’m not sure if this works for you, but it is very easy to create an Int variable for the “Active Child Index” in the AnimBP EventGraph and change it to the next animations number after a delay which is (almost) as long as your animation.
Afterwards get that Int variable in the AnimGraph and plug it into “Active Child Index” and you should be done.
Thats a much more hassle free solution than my workaround. Thanks a lot!
whats the workaround?
If you might be able to show this in some pictures I would greatly appreciate it. Sorry I’m a little unclear on the solution.
Thank you for the alternative solutions.
I’ve been tweaking the “blending” option in the montage asset detail panel to no avail until I found this post -.-
Normally, you would expect a “blending” option to blend the sequence of the given animations, but instead, it’s just blending the start and end of the montage…weird choice of word for montage editor if you ask me.
This reminds me of the “modify pose” in the retarget manager editor actually means “save pose” >.<
Using XilenceX’s method, I solved this by using anim notifys to let the state machine know when to begin blending.
I created an int variable which tells the animBP which animation should be playing, and I specified the blend time to smoothly transition between the two animations.
Here is one of my animations below. You can see how I created an anim notify near the end.
That anim notify generates an event here in my animBP:
which switches the int’s value from 0 to 1, causing my blend poses by int to switch to the other animation:
Inside those two state machines are just the two animations.
