How to handle melee weapon striking solid surface like a wall

Development Character & Animation
1

I have an attack montage setup for my melee weapon attack, and I am trying to resolve how to smoothly handle a strike on a wall for example.

So ideally when the melee weapon strikes a wall (overlap sphere triggers) I want the attack animation to stop playing (some sparks particles and a sound play) and the animation to smoothly transition back to the idle animation.

So I stop the montage after the overlap event triggers and on that stop node I can set the blend time, however in order to stop the attack animation quickly the blend time has to be at or near zero. The problem is it jerks directly back to idle.

How can I stop the montage immediately, but then blend back to idle state smoothly? Any ideas?

2

After some more time spent I discovered that I could adjust the blend out option in the montage asset to change the behavior. I ended up picking “circular out” and now I can use 0.5 seconds in the montage stop node and the end result is the attack montage stops almost right away on the wall strike event, and then takes about 0.5 seconds to blend back to the idle state, which is exactly what I was after!