Animation Montages

Ownership boundary

This skill owns authored action playback, Slots, Sections, notify-timed windows, branching, and interruption. Route final pose composition to unreal-animation-blending, authoritative Character displacement and prediction to unreal-character-movement, and ability activation/cost/cooldown ownership to unreal-gas-abilities.

Use Montages for bounded actions

Read references/action-selector.md.

Use a Montage when gameplay starts a discrete authored action and needs explicit playback, sections, events, interruption, or root-motion control. Keep persistent locomotion in a State Machine, Blend Space, or Motion Matching system. A Montage inserts an action through an AnimGraph Slot; it does not replace the underlying gameplay state machine.

Execute

1. Define action authority, eligibility, commitment, cancel, completion, and interruption states.
2. Choose full-body or regional layering and create the matching Slot/Slot Group path.
3. Build named Sections around semantic phases; define default and runtime transitions.
4. Add Notifies/Notify States only for events that must follow animation time.
5. Choose playback API: gameplay/AnimInstance, Character proxy node, or GAS Ability Task.
6. Define root-motion ownership and movement/collision behavior for every section.
7. Implement all completion, blend-out, interruption, cancellation, and owner-destruction exits.
8. Test network roles, variable frame rates, late interruption, and section boundaries.

Load only what applies:

• references/asset-sections-and-slots.md
• references/playback-and-lifecycle.md
• references/notifies-and-gameplay-windows.md
• references/combos-loops-and-variants.md
• references/root-motion-and-movement.md
• references/gas-and-networking.md
• references/debugging-patterns.md

Hard rules

• A matching Slot node must exist in the evaluated AnimGraph path or the Montage is invisible.
• Sequences in the same Slot/Slot Group can override or interfere; design concurrency explicitly.
• Sections describe playback topology; gameplay state decides whether a transition is legal.
• Treat Notify delivery as animation-timed signaling, not sole authority for irreversible gameplay.
• Use Branching Point timing only when its synchronous precision justifies higher cost.
• Play Montage exposes Montage Notify callbacks; Play Anim Montage does not expose the same proxy callbacks.
• Handle Completed, Blend Out, Interrupted, and Cancelled as distinct outcomes.
• Playing a Montage locally is not a complete network contract. Replicate/predict the gameplay action and trigger appropriate playback per role; root-motion correction does not replicate gameplay logic.
• Use Root Motion from Montages Only when the networked design relies on montage root motion.
• Keep Motion Matching/State Machines as the locomotion base; place final IK after action blending.

See references/sources.md for the UE 5.8 source trail.