In certain circumstances, you may have a situation in which you need to take several Animation Sequences and stitch them together so that they can be used as if they were just one sequence instead of many. That is exactly the purpose of the Animation Composite. An Animation Composite is an animation asset designed to allow you to combine multiple animations together and treat them as a single unit. However, be aware that a Composite simply appends animations; it does not provide any blending ability.
Animation Composites can also have their own sets of Notifies and Curves.
Creating a Composite
Creating a new Animation Composite can be accomplished inside the Content Browser by Right-clicking (or select the Add New Button) and choosing Animation then Animation Composite from the context menu.
You will also need to specify the Skeleton asset with which to associate your new Animation Composite.
Select the Skeleton from the list of those available in your project.
You will then need to name your Composite.
Your Composite is now created and ready to edit!
Editing a Composite
Double-clicking a Composite will open Persona in Animation Mode with the Composite selected and ready to edit.
The Animation Composite will be highlighted in the Asset Browser located in the lower-right panel of Persona.
At the top of the Asset Editor panel, you will see the Composite Tracks.
To add Animation Sequences to the Composite, drag-and-drop them from the Asset Browser into the Composite Tracks.
As you drag more Sequences in, they will be appended automatically.
You can move Sequences along the Composite Tracks by dragging them. You can also remove a track by Right-clicking on it and choosing Delete Segment from the context menu.
Using Composites
Once assembled, an Animation Composite is treated just like an Animation Sequence in the AnimGraph of an Animation Blueprint.
See the Animation Sequence User Guide for more details on playback of animations in Animation Blueprints.
You can also embed an AnimComposite within another AnimComposite or within an AnimMontage.
Below, an AnimComposite is created and then placed inside an AnimMontage.
Anim Asset Details
When opening your Animation Composite in Persona, there are several properties that can be adjusted inside the Anim Asset Details panel which can determine how the asset is handled. These properties include things such as tweaking playback speed or assigning any Meta Data to the asset and others which are outlined in the table below.
| Composite Properties | |
|---|---|
| Additive Settings | |
| Preview Base Pose | Preview Base pose for additive BlendSpace. |
| Length | |
| Sequence Length | Length (in seconds) of this AnimSequence if played back with a speed of 1.0 (unadjustable). |
| Animation | |
| Rate Scale | Number for tweaking playback rate of this animation globally. |
| Skeleton | Pointer to the Skeleton this asset can be played on (unadjustable). |
| Meta Data | |
| Meta Data | This is Meta Data that can be saved with the asset. The meta data is a Blueprintable class derived from the Anim Meta Data class. This allows you to add custom meta data to animation assets (Anim Sequence, Anim Montage, Anim Composite, and Blendspace are all supported). You can query the data from an animation asset in C++ by calling the GetMetaData() method, or by using GetSectionMetaData() on Anim Montages. |
| Thumbnail | |
| Orbit Pitch | The pitch of the orbit camera around the asset. |
| Orbit Yaw | The yaw of the orbit camera around the asset. |
| Orbit Zoom | The offset from the bounds sphere distance from the asset. |