World location not updating for Skeletal Mesh actor with animation asset

Development Character & Animation
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1

I have a skeletal mesh actor, that is not human controlled, and plays a premade animation asset. However it’s world/actor location won’t update in blueprints when I play the animation. How do i get the world location to update?

I’m following this tutorial below, except instead of having the gun turret follow a human controlled actor, I want it to follow a skeletal mesh Plane with an animation asset.

I want a gun turret to look at and follow a plane with its rotation as the plane flies by. The world location updates and works great for human controlled characters and for a static mesh I put in mid air and had fall with physics. However as soon as I try it with a skeletal mesh with an animation asset it won’t update it’s world location and just stays stuck on the starting location. The gun turret just looks at the planes starting location only and won’t move because world location doesn’t update for the plane as it flies.

2

Try enabling/setting Root Motion for the plane.

3

So I have already enabled root motion and checked the box on, but wasn’t able to figure out how to then set it for my plane? Unreal had a picture in their documentation for the details panel to do this, but i can’t find it where it says it’s suppose to be. It seemed like I had to set this in my animation asset? Or would it be in the model file?

4

It’s in the animation. Is your plane moving by animation only (the one created in a third-party software)? Root motion should change the plane world location according to the root bone movement.

5

I still can’t seem to find how to set the plane’s root motion in the animation asset window. Sorry in advance, I’m still new at this, would you be able to describe or point out where exactly this is in the animation asset window? I have a screenshot jpg in my last response that shows what I’m seeing in the animation asset window

6

Also yes, the plane is only moving by third part software animation. I animated it in Maya using a path constraint and curve then baked the data onto the plane and brought it in as an animation asset. The animation plays fine in Unreal, it just won’t update the world location of the plane as it plays the animation

7

I figured out a work around! I added a socket to my plane, and then got world location from the socket. While the plane wouldn’t update world location live, the socket does, and I now have the turret following the plane