Hello! Im trying to wrap my head around animating actors together in a logical way. ive followed some tutorials and managed to set up an interaction between my character and an object by using anim montages and the “play anim montage” node in the thirdpersonchar_BP, but i feel like there has to be a better way as hard coding each interaction like this feels a bit clunky.
If i have 10 different actors and they all an animation which is paired with the player character (handshakes, waves, fistbumps, whatever) is there a way to set it up so that the game tells these actors “hey, you should play your paired animation” when the players presses the interaction button for example?
Best bet would probably be to set up a data table for character actions, and give it a column for the primary animation, plus one for a reaction.
If an action has no reaction, just leave the field blank. Then when you fire your interaction in the blueprint, play the first montage on the instigator, and if there’s a valid anim in column 2, use a branch to play it on the target (or send anim as an input to a function on target).
As a slight alternative to the above, you could also just add the row name for a reply in that box instead of a hard montage reference. Could be handy if you have chars with different rigs.
Or, depending on the complexity of your design, could even throw an array of possible reply names into that column and let the target decide how to react.