Hello. I’m wondering if anyone has a tried and true solution for seamlessly transitioning an AI character from Navigating, to animating down/up a ladder and back into Navigation. I have tried to construct this several different ways with various results. All methods were using AnimMontage, which may or may not be the best approach?
Animation Setup
Offset from world zero, root at the bottom of the ladder, no root motion, with first frame at the top and ending back at the bottom.
Blueprint Setup
I tell the AI to navigate to a location at the top of the ladder (which is an offset from a root marker/targetpoint at the bottom of the ladder). When the AI is within range of the offset location, I move/sweep them to the exact offset location then move the character’s root to the root marker at the bottom of the ladder and execute the montage. This puts the character capsule at the bottom and animates the mesh from the top, climbing down.
This works great in a test level, but in the full game there is a single frame pop at the bottom where the character is visible. I tried to hide this pop by toggling mesh visibility before the teleport and after montage starts, but no matter how long the delay, there is always a pop at the root. The other problem is that because the animation is using a world offset, the setup is a one off and I would need a unique ladder animation for up/down for every ladder location in the game… not very useful.
I have also tried setting this up with the root at the top, no world offset, animating the root to the bottom. I turned root motion on and unexpectedly the character returned to the top of the ladder, rather than remaining at the bottom.
Any help or ideas on how to approach this is greatly appreciated.
