Does UE4 not support target-phase / branch window transitions?

Development Character & Animation
1

I’m used to working with other game engines that have this functionality and I’m a little dumbfounded that I haven’t found a similar capability in UE4’s animation system.

To clarify, a ‘branch window’ is simply a duration-based tag you place on an animation sequence, and you can use it within an animation graph as a conditional for transitions and to control the starting offset when transitioning into a new state. For example you can put branch windows on your base locomotion loop (leftlegpassing, leftlegplanted, etc) then branch ‘in’ to animations in subsequent states at the same phase of a target branch. So if I leave a quarter-way through the ‘leftlegpassing’ branch of the locomotion state, I can branch in to the stop animation a quarter way through a similarly tagged ‘leftlegpassing’ branch.

Is there no way to do this kind of thing within an animation graph in UE4? Are we really reduced to putting in a ton of animNotifies and manually tracking/handling them to transition to a state at a non-zero phase?

2

I don’t know if this bumps a question… But I’m also dumbfounded by this not being native. Ive been trying to use montage for this, but it really doesn’t work well and it doesn’t allow windows for branch in points. For branch out I’ve been using notifes, driving a bool, but it requires 2 notifies, and there is no reset functionality on state transition, and I cant seem to get anything requiring an activation pin in blueprint, into the state logic. I am going to have 1000 animations instead of 100 if I have to make a new animation for each branch in point for my melee moves.

3

There is, its just not well documented.
download a paragon character and have a look at the animation for walking.