I want to combine locomotion animations with a sword attack. When I mix the two and use the sword animation from the pelvis upwards, then it totally misses the pelvis motion and it doesn’t look as if the character is actually making a powerful attack.
I thought I could use the positions of the feet of the locomotion animation and let that animation run an IK movement. This way, I thought, that the pelvis behaves as intended and the feet move to the correct positions. However, it doesn’t look as if it is possible to get the foot positions of an animation.
Using pelvis as the branch filter should work. Have you tried tweaking the blend depth value and the mesh space options on the layered blend node?
Could also try doing it in reverse, with thigh_l and _r being the branch bones, then using the output from the montage slot as base pose and the locomotion pose as the additive.
Thanks for your suggestion! I played around with that. Your iea to reverse the blending is an interesting idea. It still looks wierd and it now creates movement in the feet even during an attack while standing. I guess this problem is not so easy to solve.
Sometimes, the best solution to getting melee attacks to play well with movement is just to make a new anim for them with minimal pelvis movement which only play when moving.
Even a quickie 5 minute job in level sequencer can look ok after layer blending since the character movement provides some momentum.