Yeah, I see no reason why there can’t be common code for doing all the work of driving foot IK standing on arbitrary slopes for example. And then common code for locomotion state machines, and all the other things. I’ve touched the code for Animation Blueprint Nodes a few times and there’s nothing in there that can’t allow for an arbitrary skeleton at any time. 4.13 added sub anim blueprints, which I was excited for since I thought that did this very thing. Except it still has the problem of needing a hard set skeleton.
All we need is a way to pass in as parameters what animation assets we actually want to use for each character.
Like if I have a locomotion state machine, let all of that code be common, but let me pass in the walk blendspace, and jump animation, and all the other things.
I already have many input parameters into the anim BP to specify what animation asset should be playing, such as idle hand poses for the specific gun the player is using, or what idle animation to play underneath the anim montage.
And I don’t plan on reusing the same walking animation between different characters. Each one is a fairly unique looking monster with their own walk cycles and movement styles. All I want is the common code for driving that instead of having to copy paste nodes around.