we have a project with a bunch of maps/levels that should be seen as scenes (in the movie sense) we load using level streaming, we set positions of these in editor (previously we set them before loading the maps via blueprint, but there seems to be no difference in behaviour related to the problem we are having.)
Every level has a Matinee that controls a camera, every map/scene is hidden by default until needed.
Since we need some time to have unreal load all actors when the level is set to visible (not sure why we can’t seem to get Unreal to show everything on the next tick when setting the level to visible) so we can get a reference to the matinee inside the level and set it to play, we make the level visible a second or so before it is actually needed.
Now here is where the problem starts. Since we show the level ahead of time, we can’t set the camera used by the matinee to auto activate on player 0, as that would switch the view/camera to that camera the moment it becomes available (which often is before matinee becomes available). When the camera is set to auto activate for player 0, the level stream transform is taken into consideration (so the camera is offset by whatever the level stream location is set to), however, when the camera is not set to auto activate on player 0 and we set the view target to this camera when we actually need it, the level stream location is not taken into consideration.)
After doing some testing with a very basic setup, it seems that Matinee ignores the Level Stream Transform altogether the moment a camera has keyframes.
I hardly believe this is by design, because that would mean you would not be able to create cutscenes in a project that uses Level Streaming with transforms / world composition.
Seems like the solution to our problem right now might be to redo all animation by animating the actors in level stream matinees via the persistent master scene, which is kinda a shame…
It would be great if the manual will reflect all the gotchas to these engine features in the future, just so someone else doesn’t have to hurt their head days on end trying to figure out why their project seems to bug out.
Alright, seems i figured out an even simpler solution (though I need to test a bit more, as i saw some odd shadowing artifacts, so floating errors might become a problem.)
By just parenting the actors/cameras that are controlled by the matinees to an empty Actor that is not controlled by the matinee and that Actor has ‘Ignores Origin Shifting’ set to True, it seems to move the whole lot to the proper position.
Since we animated everything with 0,0,0 as our origin, and use world origin rebasing (we rebase the origin to the transform location of the level stream that we want to view at that time), the problem, kinda corrects it self, which in our case is lucky i guess.
I think it’s safe to assume this is a looked over part of both Matinee and Sequencer, and i’ll probably post it at the forums to have it looked into.