Can you define poses/state-machines, porgramatically, inside the animation-BP (or elsewhere at all)?

[midgunner66]

I think DomusLudus had the right idea:

@DomusLudus

You can expose to variable o bind the animations
So you can change the weapon idle with a simple direct event from the weapon or the character, y put the animation in the weapon.

For stances, you would flip-flop between two variables that you change whenever you switch weapons. In other words, whenever you want to change a weapon, you set the opposite variable to the new stance, then you switch to it using a blend:
https://streamable.com/zmjljp
https://streamable.com/zmjljp

This way, you can change the animation completely through blueprints, which means you can have as many animations you want without having to manually add them to the animation graph. This also means you know only two animations are loaded at a time since there are only two variables.

This is also not limited to just stances; you can use this to solve your original “switching state machines/animation blueprints” problem. You can make one full state machine and switch the animations when the weapon is switched. This way, you only need one animation blueprint that will work with all weapons. Since the weapons will follow the same flow (e.g. attack1 → attack2 → attack3) you only need to change the animations (i.e. content), not the state machine (i.e. logic).