Ok, I create a simple scene created from the thirdperson code template. I add a matinee actor and create a simple sequence (camera flying around a level). I then click on the “movie” button in matinee, which asks me about various options, I select to record an avi sequence, I also select to disable player, disable hud etc.
When the new unreal editor instance is spawned, it then proceeds to spawn a player and record the sequence from the then-disabled players point of view, rather than the camera from the matinee actor.
Oh and another thing… when I select the “close the editor when capture starts” option, it asks me to save again, even through saving closes the matinee window and forces an update, which ultimately fails to save because the new instance of unreal engine has the assets locked I guess.
What does your Matinee look like, are you using a Director Group to control the camera? Also, when a player is spawned - is it an actual character or an invisible character?
Yeah, I have a director group with a camera track in it. I can manually do the setup myself in the level blueprint (turn off the player, play the matinee) and it works just fine.
Its an invisible character that can’t be controlled. Which is the same as I get at the end of my matinee when I do the same setup in my level blueprint. Which kind of suggests to me that the matinee sequence isn’t running or is ending straight away.
One thing, not sure it makes any difference, but I was playing with a large landscape which takes a while to load, I’ve cut the loading time out of the video above, but it just occurred to me that maybe the matinee timer might start and then the terrain might load, causing the delay which is enough for the matinee to finish? Doesn’t seem likely as its quite a long matinee, but just a thought.
Here’s the actual video I captured by adding my own player disable and matinee play nodes in the level load blueprint:
You can see me press play and spawn in at the start, just so you know it does play normally when run, so there's something about the matinee not playing somehow.
So in the first video above, when you hit play you are spawning in without the Matinee sequence starting. Towards the end when you generate a movie, what is happening is you are spawning in as an invisible character that can be controlled (it looked like a Matinee sequence started couldn’t tell if that was intended or not or if it was a character falling down to the floor).
In the second video, you set it up in the Level Blueprint and is the expected result when hitting Play or capturing a movie from the first video you posted?
What is the landscape size you are using, I will try to reproduce this on my end as well.
Yeah, when I press play I’m spawning in as a normal third person character (this is literally just a third person template with additional landscape). When I run the matinee movie, it spawns disabled (its clearly creating the character and then doing the disable movement/aim/render etc). But never runs the actual matinee sequence.
Expected result is exactly that movie I posted, I can get that movie to render by manually setting up the level load blueprint to disable the player (as is happening during the matinee run) and then play the matinee sequence, so basically doing the blueprint version of the matinee settings in the level load and then running the matinee record option.
I’m using the max size of landscape that’s listed in the landscape documentation:
Overall size (vertices) Quads per section Sections per component Component size (quads) Total Components
8129x8129 127 4 (2x2) 254x254 1024 (32x32)
Lets see if it happens with you and I’ll investigate further if it doesn’t.
Ah, no its not. I just dropped the matinee in and left it as default values. So I guess that’s probably it isn’t it? But then if that’s the case, why doesn’t the “movie” button actually set that property to true on the matinee if it won’t work without?
Ok, I tried it with the “play on level load” checked and it does work as expected. Can I recommend that “movie” button checks that property automatically when pressed?
Also, it seems strange that the recording doesn’t end when the matinee sequence ends. I’d expect a “movie” to really only be the matinee sequence I’d worked on and told to record. As it is now, it basically records every frame and ends the matinee and then continues recording until you exit.
Glad it was a checkbox (around the office here, usually when something isn’t working properly, we say there’s a checkbox that probably wasn’t ticked lol).
The reason it isn’t on by default is that you may want to trigger a Matinee sequence for other things (entering a volume and starting a cinematic, rather than when the level loads). Matinee can also be used not just for cinematic but gameplay elements as well to drive sequences which would auto start upon level load.
Regarding the Movie issue, that’s interesting. Can you write up a quick Feature Request for that in a new post and we’ll get that in front of our team to review. Seems odd that a Record button inside Matinee would record elements outside of it.
I just think that if you have a matinee open and select the “movie” thing, then it’d be useful to toggle the “play automatically” button by default for THAT matinee. Then it’d kind of work as expected.