Moving Entities With Scene Graph Animations

This tutorial is an advanced Scene Graph-specific version of the Animating Prop Movement tutorial. If you want to learn more about animation-based movement in UEFN outside of Scene Graph, check out that tutorial then come back to this one!

Moving platforms are common to most platforming games, and challenge the player to make precise jumps between targets to reach the goal.

There are several ways you can move props in UEFN. You can use functions like TeleportTo[] or MoveTo() to modify a transform directly, or use another device like a prop mover to move a prop on a preset path. However, there’s another useful option in the form of animations.

Animations have a couple of benefits over moving a prop’s transform. Animations usually have smoother movement than moving objects with MoveTo() or TeleportTo()because they avoid the network latency of having to call these functions on every game tick.

Animations also have more consistent collisions with players or other objects, and you have a greater level of control over where and how an object moves compared to using a Prop Mover device. You can play animations on a loop, or play them back and forth with the ping-pong mode.