I have a sequence setup with several animations on various characters. I have noticed that they play perfectly inside the Engine, but when outputting a sequence of frames, animations are broken, though I haven’t been able to determine what seems to be the cause. I do think it has to do with the affected characters having multiple animation clips on the sequence timeline. In each case, they are the same clip, just played multiple time, and the issue occurs every time a camera changes revealing these characters from a shot in which they do not exist.
It’s complicate d to explain. I hope this pics can help. I am using 4.11.2
The leading shot in this example does not have the characters in frame:
This next shot is the following frame in both UE4 and the rendered output in Premiere. Note that they are on the same frame but the characters in the purple box are not in the same position.
The above issue does not occur with the foreground characters, and I am assuming this is because their motion files run the entire length of the scene, which is roughly 10K franes.
Lastly, I made the observation that there seems to be some residual burn-in on the tree where the woman’s head was located, from one shot to another. During playback, this isn’t noticeable, and I assume it has something to do with the GPU, its frame buffer and how you extract it for output to a file. Just thought I would point it out with the YELOW ARROWS
I tried replacing the short animations with one long animation that covers the entire length of the scene, about 5 minutes, and the problem still exists.
I’ve noticed something else. I made a duplicate of my sequence to change the shot track and render out just one camera. This resulted in a disaster of all sorts of craziness, as if the cameras were switching every few frames and also at different points through the timeline. It made ZERO sense.
But this wackiness rendered out even if I made no changes in the duplicate, which leaves me with the idea that duplicating sequences may be the culprit in everything I’ve posted. It’s hard to tell as I have deleted the very first sequence from when I started the project.
Can you go into the details of those skeletal meshes and change “Mesh Component Update Flag” from the default of “Always Tick Pose” to “Always Tick Pose and Refresh Bones”? Let me know if that helps. If not, we’ll go from there.
That indeed fixed my problem. I haven’t rendered out the entire project, as that takes about 4 hours. Is there any reason not to use that setting on EVERY skeletal mesh in my project? I am not making a game, only rendering cinematics, so performance is not important to me.
It’s more expensive to use “Always Tick Pose and Refresh Bones”, which is why it isn’t the default. Basically what’s happening with “Always Tick Pose” is it is keeping track of the timing for the animations when the skeletal mesh is off camera, however it is not animating the bones. When it comes back on camera, it starts animating the bones again. “Always Tick Pose and Refresh Bones” updates the bones when off camera as well.
