I got a handgun off of Turbosquid (the M1911, if anyone’s curious), because I figure it’s best to learn off of free materials before I go spending somewhere between $30 and $300 on assets from the Unreal marketplace. I made an actor with two components: one for the main “body” of the handgun (I don’t know the proper term) and one for the slide. However the artist put the FBX together, when I added both components to the actor, they fit right next to each other exactly the way you’d want your gun assembled, which is convenient.
So now I want to animate the slide of the gun when I hit the fire button. The FBX came with animation assets for each individual piece of the gun, including the bullet, but none of the animations appear to…uh, animate. Turns out the Unreal editor has some basic animation capabilities built in, so I edited the animation for the slide so that it moved back a noticeable amount on the Y axis for one key frame and then back to its original position. Previews of the animation look good, but I’m literally only watching the slide move, and I can’t see it move when attached to the biggest other piece of the gun.
I set up the animation blueprint for the slide, which is its own skeleton, and I set the animation blueprint for the slide component of the handgun actor. I’ve got an animation notify that goes off at the end of the firing animation so that I can change the state back to idle, and I even threw a debug Print on the event graph so that I can tell when it gets there.
Well, I see the debug print when I hit fire, but the slide doesn’t move at all. The state machine works just fine when I change the “IsFiringWeapon?” variable, but I just don’t see anything tangible when I test in the editor. Any ideas? It’s probably related to the way the actor is set up somehow, right? Maybe I’m defying convention as to how guns are typically animated in Unreal.