Issues with animations after playing a montage

Hey all.

New to Unreal and making a basic, retro-style shooter using Unreal’s First Person template as a starting point. I’m having a bit of an issue with my weapon shooting animation, which is a montage. It’s a bit of a long one, but bear with me. There’s a checkbox setting in the AnimGraph of my animation blueprint that’s at the crux of this issue: a setting on the slot in between my weapon state machine and the weapon pose called ‘Always Update Source Pose’ (Imgur: The magic of the Internet). This fixed the first issue I was having, but created a different problem.

Issue 1) This is with ‘Always Update Source Pose’ unticked, which was the default. The montage plays with my input, but the arms jerk slightly to the side after the animation is finished, which isn’t in the montage or regular animation previews for my shooting animation (Imgur: The magic of the Internet). I don’t know exactly what’s causing this, but what I think is happening is it’s resetting to the start of my state machine for the weapon animations (the first state is an unholster animation that you can see when I pick up the gun in the video) and trying to blend the start of that animation with whatever is playing once the montage ends, which would explain the sudden arm jerk. The unholster state is then automatically transfers to my idling state after animation plays via the ‘Automatic rule based on sequence player in state’ option in the transition details.

Is there a way I can redirect back to the idle state or anything besides the entry of the state machine to prevent this?

Issue 2) This is with ‘Always Update Source Pose’ ticked. In my state machine for the pistol animations, I have a random sequence player that’s shuffling through 3 idle animations. The most infrequent of thes three idle animations has a bit more motion and involves tilting the gun around. When I press the shoot key, it will play the animation montage and shoot, but once that’s done it immediately switches back and resumes the idle animation that was being played from where it left off, which looks very odd (Imgur: The magic of the Internet).

So with this problem, it’s not resetting back to the unholster animation, but it’s basically pausing the ongoing animation, playing the montage, and then resuming the paused animation from where it left off, which looks extremely strange when in the middle of my third idle animation. Is there a way I can force it to stop the animation being played before the montage, switch to a different animation, or at least reset it rather then this pause/unpause thing going on. I could just remove my third idle animation and prevent this from happening, but doing so would mean I can’t get too elaborate with future animations, which I don’t want.

Of the two, I think I would prefer to keep the update source pose uption unticked and fix that issue by having it resume from a different state after the montage, but, hey, whatever works.

Thanks for reading.