Editing an Animation Montage

If you are new to Animation Montages, it is recommended that you read the Animation Montage Overview before proceeding.

This page covers how to set up an Animation Montage and the options within the Montage Editor.

Adding Animations to a Montage

To get started, the first thing you will need to do is add the Animation Sequences that will comprise the Montage inside the Montage area.

To do this, inside the Asset Browser window drag-and-drop an Animation Sequence into the Montage Slot track.

Once you drop the animation on the Slot track, the animation will be added.

You can drag-and-drop additional animations that you want to add to the Montage onto the Slot track and they will be added sequentially.

Animations will automatically alternate between the first and second Slot tracks to help distinguish where each animation starts and stops.

You can also left-click and drag-and-drop the animations on the Slot track to re-order them.

Right-clicking on an animation in the Montage area provides the following context menu:

Creating Montage Sections

In order to define relationships between Sections in the Sections area, you must first create the Sections that you want to work with inside the Montage area.

To create a Section, right-click on the Slot track or the Section track and select New Montage Section.

When prompted, enter your desired Section name.

When adding a new Section, it will be added to the Sections track as well as inside the Section area.

By default, all Animation Montages include a Default Section that, when used by itself, will play the entire Montage.

You can move Sections around by left-clicking and dragging the Section to the desired location.

Above we have moved our Start Section to the start of the Montage and moved the Default Section over or we can delete it.

Below we add two more Sections to our Montage for a reloading Montage with a Start, Loop and End to correspond with our animations.

Creating Montage Slots

With Slots, you can take a group of related animations (such as reloading while standing, reloading while crouched and reloading while prone) and assign them to different Slots within the Montage. Through Blueprint or C++, you can then tell one of the Slots to play the animations it contains based on whether a character is standing, crouched or prone, as they all exist within the same Reload Montage.

To add a Slot in the Montage area, you can use the right-click context menu and select New Slot.

This will create an empty Slot track to which you can add new animations.

Selecting Duplicate Slot will copy all animation segments into a new Slot track.

When adding or duplicating a Slot, you will see a warning at the top of the Montage indicating that the current Slot name is already in use and that all Slots must be unique. This is because the new Slot track will be set by default to use the Default Group and Default Slot that are created when the Montage was created. You can change which Anim Group you are in, and which Slot you are using from the drop-down menu to the right of the Slot track.

You may need to create a new Slot, which you can do from the Anim Slot Manager by clicking the Magnifying Glass button. This button will open the Anim Slot Manager panel.

Click the Add Slot button (or Add Group button based on your needs) and assign a new unique name.

Above, we created a new Slot called Prone to which we can add our prone reloading animations.

You can right-click a Slot or Group in the Anim Slot Manager to access a context menu with additional options.

Below we have renamed the Default Slot to Standing and assigned both the Standing and Prone Slots in the Montage area.

Using Multiple Slots

To get the best results when using multiple Slots, ensure that the timing of each of your animations is the same. In the image below, the arrows indicate that the timing of our Prone Reload animations does not match up with our Standing Reloading animations, which will cause problems when we play back the Prone Slot of our Montage.

If we were to call the Loop section of this Montage, the Standing Reload would play fine, but in our Prone Reload it would start midway through the animation. It would also start to loop reloading before actually reaching the Loop Section. Ideally, when creating our reloading animations, we would use the same timing and frame range so that when we call the Loop Section in either the Standing or Prone Slots, it starts at the beginning of the animation without any issues.

Above, our timing of our Standing and Prone Reloading animations are the same which will give us better results when we call either Slot to play.

Section Relationships

After you have created the Sections for your Montage in the Montage area, you can define the Sections' relationships to each other in the Sections area.

By default, all Sections are set to play sequentially, indicated by the single Section track containing each of the Sections.

Pressing the Clear button will assign a single track for each Section you have created.

Pressing Create Default will return all Sections to the single Section track.

In our example, we have a Start, a Loop, and an End. We want the Montage to play the Start section immediately, followed by the Loop section. Once we get to the Loop section, we want to keep looping that Section until the End Section is told to play through Blueprint or C++.

To do this, we first click the Start Section in the Section Track.

We can now define what Section should follow the Start Section, so we click the Loop button at the top of the Section area.

When we do this, Loop is added, and it follows Start on the first track. When we click Loop on the track, then click the Loop button at the top, Loop will turn blue.

Since we associated Loop with itself, the system knows that we want this Section to loop.

We can preview this by clicking the Preview button on the track we want to preview and the Play button from the toolbar at the bottom.

In this example, whenever we call the Start section to play in either the Standing or Prone Slots, it will play the assigned Start animation before looping the assigned Loop animation. This enables us to play the animation of reloading as many times as we need to, based on gameplay variables such as whether the player is performing a full or partial reload. We can then call the End Section to play, and return to an idle pose whenever we have determined that we are finished reloading.

To remove a relationship for a Section, click the X button next to the item.

Removing the relationship for the Loop section causes it to stop looping.

Additional Options

The Element Timing area is used for informational purposes and is covered on the Animation Montage Overview page, in short, it enables you to see at a glance the sequential playback order of any Sections, Notifies or other Events.Animation Notifies enable you to set up events to occur at specific points in the animation while Animation Curves provide a way to change the value of a Material parameter or a Morph Target while the animation is playing back.

The Timeline at the bottom of the Montage Editor enables you to playback the Montage, step forward or backward through the Montage, loop the preview playback or create a new animation object by recording Bone manipulation from the Viewport.

Montage Properties

The following is a breakdown of the Montage asset properties available from the Asset Details window: