Hi everyone,
I’m trying to understand the recommended workflow for blending a character’s Idle Stance into and out of a full-body skill animation when the poses have different foot placements.
For example, imagine the character’s Idle Stance is slightly asymmetrical:
- the body is slightly turned;
- one foot is positioned differently from the other;
- the stance is not perfectly symmetrical.
The full-body skill animation, however, starts at Frame A with a more symmetrical casting stance where the feet are closer together.
At the end of the skill, Frame Z also doesn’t necessarily match the character’s Idle Stance.
Conceptually, the transition is:
Idle Stance → Frame A → Skill Animation → Frame Z → Idle Stance
I’m currently playing the skill through an Animation Montage with standard Blend In/Blend Out.
The blend itself is smooth for the upper body, but because the foot positions are different, Unreal interpolates the legs and feet between the two poses. As a result, the feet visibly slide/translate across the ground both when entering and when exiting the skill.
The skill needs to remain full-body, because the animation intentionally contains movement of the pelvis and legs. Therefore, simply using an Upper Body slot / Layered Blend Per Bone and keeping the legs in the Idle animation would remove part of the intended animation.
My bigger concern is scalability. In the future, I may have multiple characters or races using the same skill animation but with different Idle Stances. Ideally, I would like the same skill animation to transition naturally from different idle poses rather than having to create a separate version of the skill for every Idle Stance.
What is the recommended Unreal Engine workflow for this situation?
Is there a way to procedurally adapt the transition while keeping the feet planted, for example using Foot Locking, Control Rig, IK, Pose/Motion Warping, transition poses, or another animation system, and then release the feet once the actual skill animation needs to move them?
Or is this fundamentally an animation-authoring problem, meaning that if Frame A / Frame Z have significantly different foot placements from the Idle Stance, the proper solution is to create/re-record dedicated transition animations or different versions of the skill?
In other words, I’m trying to determine whether Unreal can reliably solve:
different Idle Stance → common full-body skill animation → different Idle Stance
without visible foot sliding, while preserving the original leg animation of the skill.
Any advice on the recommended approach, especially for a game with multiple character types sharing skill animations, would be greatly appreciated.