Layered Blend Per Bone - Rotation Issues

[Zeetu]

I am having an issue where all my UpperBody animations are blending is an odd way.

I want to play the block animation on the upper body while the lower body locomotion continues. I am using Layered Blend Per Bone and setting it to the spine_02 (I have tried several other bones)

Here is my block pose inside a montage.

Here are the montage settings.

You can see below the result pose has the head off in a weird direction and the right arm doesn’t come across far enough on the body.

I’ve followed online docs related to setting up the slots and blend as below.

Here are my blend settings. I have tried changing the bones used, changing the depth. Nothing is working.

I get a similar issue with weapon swings where it doesn’t want to blend all the way to the end of the animation. It’s like the character is giving up.

To make everything more confusing, if I edit the block animation and really exaggerate the spine turn, the resulting pose ingame doesn’t change. It’s almost like the engine is blocking further turning of the body?

Any advice on what to try would be very helpful!

[3dRaven]

The “giving up” part could be due to the animation blend in and out times. You can try reducing the blend out to zero so it doesn’t blend back into the first animation, then it should reach it’s intended end.

Are the rotations of both of the animations the same? (was the new animation animated with the same local rotation axis are the first one?)

[Zeetu]

The “giving up” part could be due to the animation blend in and out times. You can try reducing the blend out to zero so it doesn’t blend back into the first animation, then it should reach it’s intended end.

I was toying with this and changing the blend times on the montage didn’t make a change. The block montage is a looping montage with just 1 frame.

Are the rotations of both of the animations the same? (was the new animation animated with the same local rotation axis are the first one?)

Not entirely sure if I’m answering this correctly but the swing and block animations are starting from the idle pose so the pelvis does match. However, I did notice that the swing animation for example is ending with the spine facing slightly to the right. Could this be an issue where the root or pelvis isnt matching between the two?

I did some testing just now where I overexaggerated how far the character rotates to the left for a left block and that did improve things, but the head is still doing odd things.

[Zeetu]

Wowowow. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction.

Are the rotations of both of the animations the same? (was the new animation animated with the same local rotation axis are the first one?)

I took my block animation and rotated the pelvis to straighten it out with the idle pose and added a key. This completely fixed the issue!

It looks like when doing upperbody animations I need to make sure the pelvis rotation is locked.

[3dRaven]

Try setting the branch filtered blend depth to 1 (or try higher) and turning on mesh space rotation blend. If it’s set to zero I think it will blend from the root ignoring the set bone (haven’t done this in a while so might be wrong)