Custom blends between animation poses

I’m trying something different with animations to cut down on authoring time, however I have hit a snag.

Essentially, rather than create lots of full animations, I’m creating static poses, and I then want to use custom curves to blend between them.

An example would be a gun idle pose and a gun recoil pose and then use a curve to blend from the idle to the recoil and then back to the idle when the player fires the gun. The curve handles the acceleration and deaccerlation of movement.

However I can’t find a way of blending using a timeline in Montages, Composits or Anim Graphs of Blueprints, although ideally I would be using Montages or Montages so that I can trigger these anims from the Character Blueprints. I can’t add timelines to the Event Graph of an Animation Blueprint or use curves to control blends in Montage or Composits. Does anyone know how to do this?

Also, I’m currently using single frame anims for these poses. Is there a better way to handle poses or anything I should be aware of when using these?

Thanks :slight_smile:

I guess you are trying to implement something similar to what Wolfire presented at GDC?

http://blog.wolfire.com/2014/05/GDC-2014-Procedural-Animation-Video

I tried setting up nodes in the AnimGraph to allow using curves in the same way Wolfire does, but it was incredibly hacky. There needs to be support for overdriving a pose strength, like additive, to allow bouncy movement. I managed to do that by converting the pose into additive space, but it was a mess.

Subscribing to thread to see what may come out of the discussion. :slight_smile:

Yeah, his results on Reciever inspired me to explore this route. I’ve currently got Timelines in my Character Blueprint driving variables in my Anim Blueprint’s Anim Graph via a vast in the Event Graph amd that seems incredibly overcomplicated, especially when I get a fully working weapon inventory and each weapon has their own curves.

I’m mimicking overdrive by placing some poses alittle ahead of where they need to be and then ending on 0.9-0.95 of the curve rather than 1.

I couldn’t resist trying to set up a system using timelines, like you do, combined with the additive stuff I did before. Looks pretty decent, but not as good as Overgrowth. I think it’s completely related to how blending is done in the engine, euler curves vs quaternion blending for example. :slight_smile:

That’s looking great, I’ll give that overdrive a go.

The next step is mirroring poses for run cycles.

Sounds good!

I created a Blueprint function library, with easing functions, which you can download if you are interested. You can find it in my thread. :slight_smile:

Sorry to dig up this thread but have either of you had any luck extending this into something capable of being a full animation system? I’ve gotten close but what I have is really hacky and poorly built D: I really wish we had more control of transitions between states. I’ve tried to use states in a loop to control it but since it’s not possible (as far as I know, that is) to control how they blend on the fly I can’t get the feet moving to sync up with the ground or account for different character heights :confused: