Animating an actor

Hello!

In my game, I have a deployable cover actor. When the actor begins existing, I want to animate it from the simple piece of cover into full deployed. The cover consists of about 6 different static meshes so it seems rather tedious to do a timeline for each piece. Is there a method I could use to basically animate it from one state (undeployed) to another (fully deployed)?

What are the methods I can use to do this and which one is the least tedious and more practical?

Undeployed:

Fully deployed:

Timelines can have multiple tracks. Make one timeline and set up a track for all the parts. You will get an output pin for each track. If you want a shortcut then it will depend on how the mechanism is supposed to work. There may be two or more parts that can use the same timeline track. Or perhaps opposing parts can use the same track but one of them negates a coordinate to get a mirror of the main motion.

A float track can be used to lerp between two locations and/or rotations. A vector track can control, well, a vector. If a part needs to deploy in more than one stage (i.e. to the side then forward instead of in a single diagonal motion), then the vector track might be the way to go.

Other than that, the only way to animate it (AFAIK) would be to get it into 3DS/Blender/etc and create animations from there.

I tried that using a lerp. However, it seems when my framerate drops, the locations of the components wont properly update (components would move halfway to their location and stop with low framerate), as opposed to being fine with high framerate.

Should I perform this a different way?

https://i.imgur.com/7pSEZDt.png

Lerp wants two stable inputs, a start and an end. The Alpha smoothly interpolates between them. If you feed RelativeLocation into it then you aren’t giving it a stable location – the SetRelativeLocaiton changes it. So you need to set up a Start location and a Finish location and lerp between those.

The timeline might be confusing things. Every time the update is called, the Lerp will get the relative location. It’s not that it gets set the first time and then the same values get reused.

Okay, if that’s the case do I need to create a location variable for each component and do as follows? Or is there a simpler method I should use instead?

https://i.imgur.com/fb30uJv.png

https://i.imgur.com/prxmQCK.png

Yep. None of the parts are going to drive themselves in and out. But like I said you can put it all in one timeline with multiple tracks so they’re all synced and it’s all in one place. And don’t forget to share curves among similarly moving parts.