Help with reversing time and animations to reverse

2 things i need help with, basically i have made my character and ai reverse. I press a button then the next 5 seconds it puts everything into an array etc and reverses for 5 seconds which works fine but i was wondering if i can do the same thing with the camera so whenever i move it in that 5 secs it will reverse the same.
2nd question is about reversing animation is this possible, i read somewhere you can do it inside animation bp but can someone elaborate, any help greatly appreciated.

Ue4 AnswerHub reverse time - YouTube example and code here.

Hello again. I recognize you from your game.

I would think you could control the location and rotation of the camera the same way you would any other actor. The problem might be that the camera is attached to the boom. If so, maybe we can find out how to detach the camera temporarily while time is reversed and then re-attach it. That means at the end we might need to set the boom rotation so reattaching the camera looks smooth.

Another thing I thought was you might want to look into Sequencer. This isn’t reversing time but it shows that Sequencer can record tracks in realtime: Unreal Engine 4 Powers Real-Time Cinematography at SIGGRAPH - Unreal Engine.

You can give a negative play rate to an animation and it will play it backwards. In your AnimGraph, select a Play Animation node and turn on the “As Pin” for “Play Rate”. Use a variable to feed -1.0 into all your play nodes and you should see them play backwards. The problem is the transitions won’t work backwards. I’ll have to think about that one or maybe someone else knows. Again, I suspect Sequencer would handle it.

OK I thought about it a little. If you don’t use Sequencer then getting the animation transitions to work backwards would require a bit of tricky work. I’d duplicate the anim graph, reverse all the transitions to the other direction, and put a NOT in front of the transition rule terminal node. My intuition says that would work but I can make a guarantee. I suspect you’d also have to consider any Notifies in the animGraph (i.e. a Notify in the “Start Transition Event” would probably need to go in the “End Transition Event” spot for reverse transitions).

I think you can have multiple state machines in the same AnimBP and switch between them.

Or if you did it in the same graph (it’d be a bit messy), just check an IsInReverse bool as well.

Hey again good sir thanks for the response i will look into it and get back to you

So ive tested a few different things in animationbp but my character is still in idle im not sure why, im using blend poses by bool and the blendspace is -1 nothing is working so i think sequencer is the way to go. Can i record sequencer by the players camera and set it to record as sson as i press the button then reverse it?.
Btw that link you sent is blocked in AU

When you start going backwards you probably won’t be starting from idle. You will need a special node connected to the “Entry” node. The special node would connect to all the other nodes in the graph so they can all potentially be the initial state. At least, that’s what I figure.

I don’t know much about sequencer. I know it can record in real time. I think it records actors as tracks like in a midi file. I don’t know if it records the anim graph, transitions and all, but it should at least record the bones’ locations. Otherwise it couldn’t handle everything it does.

The link is on the Epic website so I’m not sure why it would fail. You can find it with a search for “Sequencer Hellblade”. Again tho, no guarantees on this. Maybe if you figure it out you can let me know. :slight_smile:

Ok so i have done some researching and tested sequence recorder it would work perfect if i can get it to record in blueprints, im trying to use execute console command but nothing works. Only works if i record from the tab then press play etc and it gives me animation which is perfect so anyone how i can record via bp?

From what I can tell, Epic took the Start and Stop nodes that were available to a game and made them editor-only. All I see so far is the console command… Wait, no. I can see in the source that the console commands only work in the editor now. Why would they remove this feature?

I guess the live Hellblade demo was run from the editor.

It looks like there might be a way to access the functionality of FSequenceRecorder from C++. What is editor-only is the module that provides access to the actual recorder.

meh i think i give up, i found out how to record via bp but no way to reference it and reverse just going to stick with what i had