How could I go about achieving the following?
Let’s say I’ve got a character who can cast a spell. Aside from having some kind of impact on the game, the spell also comes with an animation, some particle effects and sounds, whose timing need to match specific points in the animation.
What I’d like to do is define all of these visual/audio effects once (via Matinee or Blueprint?), ideally in one place, so the entire setup gets loaded in whichever level the character is placed. We can’t define the entire setup in C++ because we need our team’s artists and sound designer to be able to tweak the timings and referenced effects from within the editor.
That sounds like a job for Matinee in combination with the Character Blueprint, but I’ve run into two problems with that:
- I can’t reference Matinee in Blueprint classes
- I can only link Matinee animations directly to Skeletal Mesh Actors, not to Pawns or derived classes with Skeletal Mesh Components
Please correct me if I’m wrong about either of those.
An alternative would be to construct a Timeline and use events to trigger animations/pfx/sounds separately, though this could get rather complicated and loses the convenience of seeing how long animations or sounds are going to take. On the other hand, I’ve been unable to give this a try because I’ve yet to find out how to actually trigger an event within a Timeline EventTrack.
But maybe I’m going about this the completely wrong way? Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance!