my animation pauses/disappears/does not play unless I'm looking at it

So today I imported a skeletal mesh with one simple animation of the mesh moving up and down. The mesh is just a ball, with a joint that animates the ball. I put the mesh in a scene and assign the animation in the properties of the mesh using “Anim to Play”. I have it on loop and playing.

So I press launch, see the ball moving up and down. It moves through the ground plane, disappears and stops looping. I move the camera under the ground plane and the mesh starts playing again, moving back up on top of the ground plane, but now it stops coming back down, until I point my camera to it again… If I zoom out so I could see the ball all the time, it’ll play fine, but if I zoom in so that the mesh gets out of my view, it just disappears and stops playing. Anyone can tell me what is going on here?? thx

What is going on is, Unreal optimizes everything, which is why it can run so well on so many systems. Calculating animations can be a generally slow task, so, by default, any animated objects that are “occluded” (technical term for hidden from view) stop getting animated, and most of the time they also stop getting rendered altogether (which is called occlusion culling). There is a way to disable this behavior, but I don’t know how, which is why I’m posting this as a comment.

Skeletalmeshcomponent has a flag called something similar meshupdate###flag. Make sure to choose alwaysrefreshbones.

Thanks,

–Lina,

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THANK YOU !

Thankyou !!

n 4.21 it was renamed

269791-capture.png

Thank you so much!