Help With Animation Notifies

[FledglingLeader]

So I have set up an animation notify on the attack animation of my melee monster. A few questions relating to this.

*Does the notifier activate automatically every time the animation is played, or do I need to create a reference to it with conditions?
*Can I reference the notifier in the monster's primary blueprint, or does it need to be done in the animation blueprint?
*I currently have the melee collision setup using a capsule component attached to a socket on the monster, and using the OnComponentOverlap event. Is there an equivalent node I can use for this?

Basically, I need some help with the flow control relating to the use of the notifier. All suggestions are welcome. Thanks.

[Cody38R]

To answer your questions
1. Yes, kinda.
2. Yes, kinda again.
3. I'm not sure what you mean.

Think of animnotifies as the animation equivalent of creating custom events, except the condition which triggers the animnotify is the animation playing. When you make an animnotify, you gain access to "AnimNotify_Whatever" node in the animation BP.

If you're watching your animation repeat in the viewer, every time the progress line goes over the anim notify, it fires an event at your AnimNotify node. So, you could set yours up to Cast To Melee Monster when activated. Here's how mine is set up:
Mine is meant to allow you to hit attack during the animation to queue up the next attack, so I have a CustomEvent saved in my ThirdPersonCharacter blueprint connected to a bunch of other logic. When the first attack anim is played, it triggers the "SaveAttack?" notify, which then casts to ThirdPersonCharacter, which allows me to do all the logic there instead of the anim BP.

Hopefully I didn't ramble too much but I see too many short answers on here leaving people still lost, and I figure too much info is better than too little.

[FledglingLeader]

That was informative. I appreciate extra information. It is better than a short explanation that doesn't tell me how to do any of what is being suggested.

So my last issue is that I currently have an OnComponentOverlap setup which detects a collision between the monster and the player at any time and inflicts damage. I am just wondering what node I should use to check for that same collision, but only when the animnotify fires.

[Cody38R]

You could do something like setting a boolean to true when the animnotify fires, and then a delay to set it to false. So animnotify > Attacking True > Delay set to the duration of the animation after the notify > Set Attacking False. Then when reducing health, check if Attacking is true with a branch, if it isn't, do nothing, and if it is, take damage as normal.

There's actually a quite useful video I used which shows how to set "hitboxes" on weapons, you could do that too if you wanted, that way the collision is between the player's/monster's weapon and then the target capsule. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjDsPr4ujDE This also shows what I suggested.