`animation`

Animation & rigging Experimental

Helpers for skeletal animation: anim blueprints, blend spaces, IK, retargeting, and montages.

What it's for

This namespace covers the skeletal animation side of the editor: Animation Blueprints, Blend Spaces, AnimSequences and AnimMontages, IK rigs, retargeting between skeletons, and runtime montage playback. Ask your assistant to build or wire up an animation asset in plain language and it runs these operations for you.

Reach for it when a single request settles the operation: create an Animation Blueprint bound to a skeleton, spin up a 1D or 2D Blend Space, generate a Control Rig configured as an IK rig, batch-retarget a set of clips from one skeleton to another, or trigger a montage on a placed actor during PIE. It also reads back read-only AnimSequence metadata in the same shape as an asset dump, so your assistant can inspect length, frame rate, notifies, and curves as text.

For fine-grained authoring — bone tracks, montage sections and timing, blend-space samples, anim-graph node values, transition rules, IK chains, and retarget chain mappings — the work lives in the animation.authoring subgroup. For low-level text-IR compile and decompile of an Animation Blueprint's graphs, use the anim namespace instead. Most of the work here needs the target Skeleton to already exist, so create or import it first.

This area is experimental. It works, but the operations and their shapes are still changing as the animation surface matures, so expect the occasional rough edge.

Examples

Create an Animation Blueprint for a skeleton

Ask for an ABP bound to an existing skeleton and it lands in the content browser ready to author.

You: Make an Animation Blueprint called ABP_Mannequin for the SK_Mannequin skeleton.

  call("animation.create_animation_bp", {name:"ABP_Mannequin",
        skeletonPath:"/Game/Characters/Meshes/SK_Mannequin_Skeleton"})
    → {ok:true, path:"/Game/Animations/ABP_Mannequin"}

Done. Created ABP_Mannequin bound to SK_Mannequin_Skeleton.

Build a 2D locomotion Blend Space

One call dispatches by the dimensions param and sets up the axes for you.

You: Create a 2D blend space BS_Locomotion for that skeleton, speed 0-600 on X, direction -180-180 on Y.

  call("animation.create_blend_space", {name:"BS_Locomotion",
        skeletonPath:"/Game/Characters/Meshes/SK_Mannequin_Skeleton",
        dimensions:2, minX:0, maxX:600, minY:-180, maxY:180})
    → {ok:true, path:"/Game/Animations/BS_Locomotion"}

Done. Created 2D blend space BS_Locomotion.

Play a montage on an actor in PIE

With PIE running and the actor ticking, trigger a montage on its skeletal mesh at half speed.

You: Play the Wave montage on Hero_1 at half speed.

  call("animation.play_montage", {actorName:"Hero_1",
        montagePath:"/Game/Animations/AM_Wave", playRate:0.5})
    → {ok:true, played:true}

Done. Playing AM_Wave on Hero_1 at 0.5x.

← Back to all namespaces