Animation transition blend duration question

Development Character & Animation
1

I bought some popular anim packs on the marketplace and I noticed something: the animations that are supposed to follow each other are always cut on the same frame. For example, WalkStart ends and WalkLoop starts one the same frame. Idem, WalkStop starts on last frame of the WalkLoop.

I think it’s wrong. The transition blend takes some time, like 0.2s by default. I think there should be some slack left. WalkStart should overlap walk loop by few more frames, like half step, so when the transition occurs it blend between similar frames on both sides. Same for the WalkStop, it should start in the middle of the previous step, so we can adapt the animation.

I hope it makes sense :slight_smile: I tried to add some frames to both sides of walkstop and walkstart and play with sync markers and it’s much more smooth this way.

2

Having the next take in a sequence start at the end of the of the first take is the normal way that the animation needs to be set up. From there you can easily change the ease in/ease out, blend weight and exit result in a state machine…

For example you can set a time remaining ratio as the exit argument to 10% that forces the state change to begin exiting when there is 10 percent left and the blend is based on the blending weight using the ease in/ease out. With the takes butted end to end the larp becomes seamless

3

I have a feeling that it’s considered normal way, but I believe it’s wrong.

It the first anim ends and the second starts on the same frame. then when you overlap them you overlap wrong frames.
But if you leave a little slack you blend perfectly.

For example, you have WalkStart and WalkLoop anims, your blend duration is of 0.2s which corresponds to about 6 frames. When you start blending you are 6 frames from the end of walk start and when you end you are 6 frames into walk loop. When you play that you have a hitch: the foot is suddenly accelerates and slips. This is because you advances 12 frames instead of 6, which is like playing at 2x speed.

If you add those 6 frames from the beginning of the walk loop to the end of the WalkStart then you blend between exactly the same thing on both sides.

4

Well if you have a need for any reason you could just make a copy of the animation and remove, truncate, to the frames you wish to use.

5

I want to take few frames from one anim and append to the other. In UE there is no way. I had to use maya time editor for that.

6

You can actually record animations and combine poses in UE4 - however it’s a lot easier to do it in an outside editor.