Render Actors in Sequencer

The Sequencer is a powerful non-linear editing suite and is the primary tool you will be using to create Cinematic content in Unreal Engine. You will find more information about how to use it in the following documentation Cinematics and Sequencer (UE Docs)

By default, all the models will be correctly animated when you Play the Game or Simulate the Level using the Play button from the main toolbar of UE.

However, the animation of the imported actors will not be previewed in the sequencer, they will appear as static when you hit the play button on the Sequencer:

Despite not being previewed as animated when the play button from the Sequencer is used, notice that the actors do appear as animated when the animation is rendered, only the preview is not animated. To verify this, you can make a simple test video using the quick render button from the Sequencer:

You should get something like this:

Although it makes sense for a tool that has been designed to create animatics (in-game pre-choreographed actions), this behavior is very unintuitive for people who are used to standard 3D applications like 3dsMax, Maya, Cinema4D, Blender, etc.

We talked to Epic Games about this issue and their answer was that this happens because UE does not execute the game when you hit play in the Sequencer, it only starts the animations and events that you have configured in the tracks you added to that particular Level Sequence asset.

They proposed 2 alternative solutions to this problem:

1. Add and set up all the models and animations of each anima® actor in the sequencer, which is not really an option when you have a lot of actors. Also, this approach will just not work when using 4D models because these do not have an animation track as the standard skeletal meshes.
2. Execute the [Play] button and right after that [Simulate] (Alt+S) just before clicking the Play on the Sequencer. That will let you see the animations in your preview window, but with an arbitrary delay that depends on how quickly you can start both actions manually.

We propose you a 3rd solution that is a bit more complex but also ends up creating a more intuitive workflow, similar to the one you have in standard 3D apps. If you want to get similar behavior to a regular 3D application, please follow this process:

1. Open the Level Blueprint.

2. Select your sequencer in your World Outliner, where you already have set up all your cameras, and add it to the Blueprint.

3. Once you have it, add a "Get Sequence Player" to its main blue connector:

4. Then go to the "Event BeginPlay" and drag out from that white triangle to add a new function called "Play Looping".You might need to disable the "Context Sensitive" check to be able to see it listed.

5. Now connect the Sequence Player to the Target of the Play looping.

6. Finally, compile and save the blueprint.

And that's it. Now, when you click the Play button from the main toolbar. You will see the animations of the actors through the cameras that you have set up in your Level Sequence.

You can use the motion clip Phase parameter to offset the animation, either in anima®:

Or directly in Unreal Engine:

Also, you can use blueprints to automatically apply an arbitrary phase to an array of 4D models:

After your Level Sequence asset is finished, you can render the movie either using the Sequencer Render Movie or the new Movie Render Queue. The former was the only way to render scenes in versions 4.26 or older, but since it was introduced in version 4.27, Epic Games recommends using the Movie Render Queue instead of the legacy method that is still available in the Sequencer options. This new Movie Render Queue module offers a lot more features and versatility and Epic define it as the "successor" to the older Render Movie tool that is available in the Sequencer:

To start using the Movie Render Queue, you just need to enable it in the Plugins window:

After that, you will find it here:

In UE there are different levels of quality in the viewport that can be managed in the Engine Scalability Settings, here:

By default, all viewports are configured to use the Epic mode. However, when you render an animation using the Sequencer, by default UE uses the Cinematic mode to take advantage of the fact that the fast Realtime response is not needed anymore, so it uses extra time to try to generate the best possible quality in the final video.

Our plugin uses the highest possible quality of texture and geometry in the 4D Digital Humans models when it is running in a Cinematic quality viewport, so you should expect slower frame rate times when rendering a sequence than when previewing the same animation in the Editor viewport.

If you need to improve the performance of your sequencer, you can set UE to use the same Epic quality also in the Sequencer. This will decrease the Quality but significantly increase the rendering speed up to the same Realtime response that you can see by default in the Editor viewport. To do this, you must disable the "Cinematic Engine Scalability" parameter in the "Render Movie Settings" dialog that appears when you render your sequence:

Or, if you are using the Movie Render Queue, it is also possible to disable the Cinematic Quality setting  (enabled by default) by adding a Game Override:

If you want to keep the Cinematic Quality for your environment but you still need an improvement in the render time performance, you can enable the plugin setting "Use 4d LODSystem in Cinematic" and that will dynamically change the Level of Detail of the 4D models as it is done by default when using the Epic Quality.

To get the best possible quality just leave the default values in the anima® plugin settings and make sure that you are using the Cinematic Quality. That will make the plugin use always the best quality LoD on all the 4D models when the render sequence is being processed.

If you are getting Moiré artifacts in the textures of the 4D models, you can enable the setting "Calculate Mipmaps for Cinematic". However, be aware that when this option is enabled, each frame can take up to 2-4 seconds to render instead of a few milliseconds.