I have a question about how to time an effect to an animation.
I am doing a breaching whale. I have the animation of the whale breaching, and the whole effect should last 10seconds.
Knowing that the entire effect should last 10seconds should I put all emitters into one particle system and make sure all required modules are set to 10seconds? Then put both the skeletal mesh with animation, and the particle system into a level sequence that has a duration of 10seconds. Or is there a better way to do it?
Should I use the level sequence (matinee) to do this? I don’t know how else to do it because I need to see the sk animation in relation to the particles.
I also tried adding each particle event into its own particle system (totaling 4) into the level sequence then activating them as needed.
Any advice on how to time this would be appreciated.
Is your water mostly planar or is there a lot of Z movement on it? If its mostly as calm as what the video you posted shows. You could attach your emitters to the whale (which I assume they are already) and test for their Z position to start your emitters once their Z value is greater than the Z value of your ocean.
Setting it up that way you’ll not have to change your timings if the animation of the whale breaching changes, and you are going to be able to reuse them for variation of multiple breaching animations.
If you want it to be tightly connected to the animation, I would suggest using Animation Notifies in Persona (Skeletal Mesh Animation Editor). In that way, you could keep all the effects separate each with it’s own individual timings and then have them activate accordingly in the Animation itself.
