I have lots of items in my game currently and was putting off making animations until later in the project as I know it will take a while. My preliminary setup was to have a singular animation blueprint for my character mesh, and then have a blend by integer (I don’t remember the exact name of the node but it just lets me blend the upper body anims by integer with the singular set of lower body anims). As I have started making lots of animations, I am realizing these account for a lot more memory than I had initially expected.
My question is, what would the best way to do this while only loading in the animations relevant to the equipped items? I am saving some memory by having montages/animation instances be loaded asynchronously for things like reloads, attacks, equip animations, etc but for ongoing animations like walk/sprint/aim that are in state machines, it doesn’t seem like there is an option to asynchronously load these.
I feel like making a singular parent animation blueprint and then having a child for each weapon which gets asynchronously loaded and set when an item is equipped is the best way to free up memory but I wanted to ask if anyone has input as I am not that familiar with ue5 animation systems.