Hi there,
I’m working on a sword-fighting game with a moderately complex set of animations. I’ll try to describe what’s happening as best I can, but let me know if anything doesn’t make sense!
Context
Our character has two stances - left leg-leading and right leg-leading - and a number of attacks per stance. I’m using montages to control attacking.
I have two ‘slots’, upper-body and lower-body. The lower-body will handle locomotion, and a montage root motion-based dodge system. The upper-body will handle attacks with the sword, and a few other state machine-driven actions.
Problem
In our test attack montage, the character swings their weapon from left to right, more or less horizontally. In the animation as imported, there is negligible head movement - they are always facing forward. However, when blending the animation as a montage over the lower body using a layered blend per bone node (spine_01 set to 0), all of the character’s upper body movement is translated onto the relevant bones without factoring in the lower body, meaning that the character’s head turns from left to right relative to the pelvis rather than looking straight ahead throughout.
In other words, the rotation is added to the pelvis rotation, when ideally it would factor it in.
Am I missing a setting somewhere that affects this behaviour, or will I need to change my animation design, such as by removing all animation from the lower-body in my animation tool?
Any suggestions/advice very much appreciated!