Animations
Each dialogue node contains two variables for playing animations on your characters: Body Animation and Facial Animation.
Setup
To play animations on the correct skeletal meshes you need to add a tag to the correct body-part so Narrative knows where to play the animation.
Some meshes do not have a split between the face and body. See Single mesh animations for a workaround.
Facial animation
To set up the facial skeletal meshes, find your skeletal mesh component that will play your facial animation. Add an component tag of:
Face
Narrative follows the Unreal standard of facial animations only moving the face bones / shape keys. The neck should not be part of this animation.
If you need to change this behaviour, you will need to modify your Animation Blueprint to support this.
Body animation
To set up the Body skeletal meshes, find your skeletal mesh component that will play your body animation. Add an component tag of:
Body
Animation Blueprint changes
By default Unreal does not play Animation Montages on default skeletal meshes.
Create an Animation Blueprint by Right-clicking in your Content Drawer -> Animation -> Animation Blueprint.
Open the AnimGraph and add a DefaultSlot node at some stage of the animation.
Most of the time it's safe to add right before the Output pose, so it overwrites all animations with the montage you want to play.
Animations still not working
If the animations still don't work after setting the tag and animation blueprint, make sure the montage you are using is supported by your character.
You can accidentally select unsupported animations and not warn you about it.
Single mesh animations
To play multiple animations on a single mesh, you need to set up Animation Slots.
Animation Slots allow you to specify on animations, which bones they affect instead of changing the entire meshes bones.
Animation slot setup
Open up your facial animation and set up a new animation slot called HeadSlot from the anim slot manager.
Now open your animation montage and set teh Montage DefaultGroup to your new Animation slot. (we are using UpperBody here)
Animation blueprint setup
Modify your animation blueprint to make the Facial animation slot play after the default slot (used for the body).
Make sure to set it to your new Facial slot.
Playing both animations
Finally, we need to tell Narrative to play both animations on the same mesh.
By default, Narrative stops any existing montages then plays the one that is required. This functionality won't work, but it can be overridden.
Open your master dialogue and override the PlayDialogueAnimation function.
Get access to your speakers mesh, then play both facial and body montages on this mesh.
If you have set up your animation slots correctly, it should play both animations.