I made a blend space to manage a typical set of idle/walk/strafe/run animations and while this system is really nice and very easy to use (even for people who used UE3 for far too long like me :), I encountered a few problems :
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Even though you can right-click on a point in the blendspace and specify its value on each axis, if the values you specified are not exactly the coordinates of one of the grid points, the point is displayed in red and when you hover over it a message says “This sample is in an invalid location. Please drag it to a grid point”. This is problematic because if in that simple locomotion example you have a walk speed of, say, 127 and a run speed of 500, you need to make a ton of subdivisions in the speed axis. In real situations, the actual values you want to use in a blendspace will vary because of gameplay constraints for example, and having only equal subdivisions means that to handle that people will have to use a crap-ton of axis divisions. Being able to set the exact values at which each axis has grid divisions instead of just specifying a number of equally spaced divisions would be good solution for this.
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It does not seem to be possible to manage root motion in a blend space. Did I miss something related to that ? As it is, it looks like I have to get all my walk cycles without root motion and then re-import them in UE4 to be able to work with them. Some animators typically leave root motion in the animations for walk cycles and this can actually be pretty useful even when you ignore it in-game because you can easily check the distance traveled by the character directly in the engine without having to ask the animator for this info. You lose that info if you remove root motion from the anim before importing it. Anyway, having a flag somewhere to say “ignore root motion” even for the entire blend space would be quite useful.
Any info on these subjects would be great.
Thanks.