Animation Notifies

Animation notifies can be classified in two ways:

• By the type of notify:
  • Skeleton Notifies
  • AnimNotify Objects
  • Animation Montage Notifies.
• By the length:
  • Instant notifies, active only in one frame
  • Extended notifies (State Notifies), which are active during several frames.

Skeleton Notifies

Skeleton Notifies are created in the skeletal mesh, and can be used by all its animations. Skeleton notifies can only be instant (there are no skeleton state notifies) and only have a name and cannot contain additional data. This type of notifies have to be reacted to in the AnimBlueprint associated with the skeleton, using the events AnimNotify_%NOTIFY_NAME%.

Skeleton Notifies are better suited for simple events that are common to several animations.

Example:

Footsteps, instead of using a Play Sound notify in each walking animation, and having to set the sound one by one, by using an Skeletal notify there is only one place where to define the sound (the AnimBlueprint). This also gives more flexibility, allowing to change the sound depending or the surface

AnimNotify Objects

AnimNotify Objects are the classes of Notifies the inherit from AnimNotify (or AnimNotifyState). This type of notifies are the only ones that can contain additional data and implement functionality by themselves. Instead of other objects listening to this notify firing, the logic is implemented in the class by overriding the ReceivedNotify (or ReceivedNotifyBegin ReceivedNotifyTick ReceivedNotifyEnd for AnimStateNotifies) methods. This methods have access to the SkeletalMesh (giving the change to get the Actor/Character using GetOwner), and the Animation Sequence/Montage.

This type of notifies are not capable of changing their behaviour depending on the execution.

Example:

In an attack animation with a sword you could have a Trail notify for displaying a trailing effect, but the data for that effect is set when editing the animation. It is not suited to being changed in runtime if the sword is now enchanted with fire and wants to change the trail color to red.

Montage Notifies

Montage Notifies are similar to the Skeleton Notifies, as they only define a name and cannot contain data, but they can be listen to from anywhere and support extended notifies using Montage Notify Window.

Montage Notifies are useful for implementing logic that needs to interact with the rest of game systems, as they can listened to where they have full context.

Example:

A chest could listen to an open montage notify and trigger a trap associated with the chest.