I found a great tutorial from Hangry Bunnies From Mars on how to get an animated mesh to move along a spline. I created the blueprints and everything worked great, except for one problem – the salamander moves sideways to the spline. You can see in the image below, the salamander is 90 degrees rotated from the vector of the spline, which causes him to walk sideways, looking very silly.
I tried rotating the mesh in the blueprint viewport, but no luck. The rotation may look fine in the viewport, but when you play the animation, it reverts back to it’s original orientation.
One thing that’s very nice and handy about Unreal blueprints, is that in the Details panel where you plug in the Animation and Mesh they are color coded green and megenta so you know which part of the mesh to plug in where. Pretty handy once I noticed it!
Below is the Event Graph blueprint. Everything works splendidly, except the proper orientation.
After spending quite a bit of time on this without an answer, I went to Plan B, which was to animate it using Cinematics.
This method worked beautifully, and kept the proper scaling and rotation.
There are a lot of tutorials out there on how to attach an animated mesh to a spline using Blueprints, which leads me to wonder why that method might be preferred over using a Cinematic?
