That’s the “I dont care” way to make anything. Since I care I definitely wrote too much…
No. your gun states need their own idle/walk/run. That’s not really an opinion it’s a must, even to adjust the bone ik.
download the free anim starter pack, it comes with some examples of gun movement.
Also get the jetpack one that’s currently free and look at how they did things in there.
Lastly, let’s not go skipping things because “oh I can just blend”.
You move differently when you carry something. You move even more differently when doing different activities.
Everyone of those movement states should be accounted for, with either in it’s own state machine or a blend space utilizing a somewhat complete animation.
Let’s also address a couple things. Are you making this in 3rd person or first person?
first person you could get away with a blend if you polish the enemies to have a couple different states. You’ll be generally too busy killing them to notice they move badly.
if you are instead doing this in 3rd person or with a camera switch, well then you need a beefy animation blueprint with numerous states to have the game feel “normal”
The anim starter pack gives you a run down of a walking with rifle state and you can and should quickly include the different parts which need additional animation.
you’ll get idle, walking, and running animations while holding a rifle, as well as a few directional version that really are quite different.
you’ll also get a couple of reload/equip which you can blend to locomotion if appropriate (I wouldn’t do so while crouching for instance).
the prone state only has very few animations and needs to be manually expanded - or you could look into Root Motion and make the character only spin around in prone… if you do that look up the prone IK so that the body can conform to the floor.
All that said you have to match the style of the pack you purchased to make full use of it.
So if you have states,
The possibly worse case scenario involves a 380 walk (split in increments of 45deg) that’s 8 different animations per locomotion state.
8 for idle of you want to nitpick.
8 for walking
8 for running
8 for crouch idle
8 for crouch walk
8 for crouched run if you add that.
8 for prone
8 for prone move
8 for prone run if you make an MGS style game…
The same 24 states are likely required for at least 3
weapon types: long gun, short gun, and melee.
that’s easily a good 150 animations you need to create and implement for a decent motion system.
more if you add things like sneaking that change the root motion of things.
And that is basically why Bone IK is important.
If your animations cannot adjust the position of the gun via the IK bones you will need to go through and manually edit each and every animation to adapt it on a per character basis. That’s likely another set of about 72 animations and it gets pretty cumbersome.
set up and understand Bone IK first if you have multiple characters, then be mindful of it while animating the gun states so that you don’t have to backtrack.
Keep in mind that if you just take your basic walk/run and layer the upper body to a new montage you’ll be running into problems with hit state and basic logic. Is the character running or shooting? Which state do you blend your reload to if your arms are those of a default walking space because you are overwriting the top portion montage that makes you go back to the proper weapon?