Big disappointments

This project is proving to be a huge disappointment. After about a week trying to figure out the animating emissive problem I have decided not to sink any more time into it and have given up. This is a huge disappointment to me as it really would have been something impressive that nobody else  has even thought to attempt. I do feel that I bit off more than I could chew with this but because I started in Maya the emissive map and the warp stretch were easy to create, leading me into a false sense of security as I just assumed that UE4 would be similar but I was very wrong. Not having the emissive glow is a big blow to the quality of my work and I am very angry and disappointed that I spent a whole week trying to figure out how to use the blueprints, material nodes and matinee to get the map to start glowing when I needed it to and the closest I got was making a slider for a material instance that changed the glow intensity to pre defined limits. Overall I'm starting to regret moving into UE4 for animating however if I hadn't I would be struggling with Mental Ray, render times and trying to use shaders to make 'poor mans PBR' as I can't remember the actual name for the nodes. I think this project might have been a bit to ambitious for my current knowledge level and a bit of a waste as I have not really learnt anything new, other than how not to do things. It wouldn't be as bad if things had eventually worked after my tinkering but they didn't and therefore I never learnt how to use things correctly, which in my opinion is wasted time as I have gotten nothing out of it.