Need help getting an Animation Montage to play

Hey folks. I’ll preface this by saying I am not an animator and have almost zero knowledge about animation. Since we’re a very small team, though, I’ve had to learn how to make animation blueprints but nothing fancy. So, I’ve been unable to get this montage to play. I read through this documentation, which is how I ended up with what I’ll show below: Animation Montage | Unreal Engine Documentation

I have a caster in our game that I want to animate a casting animation that consists of two parts: a 1.5 second wind-up, and then a final cast animation when the spell goes off. To accomplish that, I took the channeling animation and cast animations provided by an animator and put them into a montage that plays them in order with the right timing etc. That montage looks like this:

The montage’s preview looks correct So, the goal for this character, which doesn’t move, is simply to break its idle animation, play the montage, then go back to idling. After reading through the documentation and reading answerhub, I set up his AnimGraph like this:

I have no idea if that is correct or not. Another poster was told to do that, and the documentation did that but with a blend node, so I gave it a shot. Unfortunately, no luck.

I also went into the character’s event graph and set it up with a bool of “IsCasting,” as I saw that as another solution. That looks like this:

Since that didn’t seem to do anything, I broke out the check to remove the possibility of me not setting that bool correctly during gameplay. Now it just looks like this, and I expected it to play the montage:

Still no luck. Just to make sure I provide more information, here’s the simple state machine that he’s got. Maybe I’m doing something wrong there.

So, what am I doing wrong? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

This fell off the main page pretty quickly and I still really need help, if anyone can offer any. Thanks.

I’m having a similar problem, but I can see where you could’ve gone wrong.
In the animgraph try to store the “warlock state machine” into a new cached pose, then use that cached pose, conect it to a “layered blend per bone”. In that node’s config panel add a new branch filter under “layer setup”. For the bone name type “spine_01” (or the equivelent in your skeleton), set blend depth to 1 and check “mesh space rotation blend”.
After call another cached pose, connect it to the slot and then to the layered blend per bone, in slot blend poses 0. Finally connect layered blend per bone to final animation pose.
Hope this works, give me some feedback!

i feel like this video might help answer your question…