Hi, lately I have to deal with a first person animation (a pull down visor action to activate night vision) that is supposed to work and blend nicely with any item that is currently equipped, thus it has to blend nicely from arbitrary base poses. Rather than having individual intro animations per item, I want to try and see what I can achieve with some advanced blending techniques. That’s why I finally started digging into blend profiles to get the most out of the blending options that unreal offers.
However, as far as I understood there are two different types of Blend Profiles. The Time Blend Profile and the Weight Blend Profile. The first of the two is a normalized blend where you assign each socket a value between 0 and 1 to adjust the timing of the socket’s blend. the second one as far as I understand serves as a multiplier for the given default blend time. e.g. a set blend time of 0.5 with a profile value of 1, results in a blend time of 0.5. A profile value of 2 would then result in a blend time of 1.
So far so good. BUT! Here’s the thing: Either of these blend profile types seems to make faster blends happen at the very beginning of the blend out phase rather than letting them blend out faster but later. For example, my longest blend needs to be 0.5 seconds in my specific case. SO I set my default blend out time in the animation montage to be 0.5. But I want my characters fingers to blend much faster. So intuitively what I would do is using one of the blend profile types to make the fingers blend faster (let’s say twice as fast). And it works, the fingers will actually blend faster when I adjust the fingers’ profile values. But the problem I run into is, that my fingers start blending out already 0.5 seconds before the montage has finished. What I actually expected was seeing the fingers blend out faster and additionally later as well, because I still want the fingers to finish their blending at the same time the animation has finished. With either blend profile type what happens is that my fingers start blending out 0.5 seconds before the montage has finished and they finish their blend 0.25 seconds before the whole montage has finished.
I am not sure If I managed to explain my problem well enough for others to understand, but I hope some experienced people out there that worked much more with blend profiles so far than I did will know what I am talking about and hopefully have some advice for me. To sum it all up, what I am trying to achieve is to adjust individual blend times per socket, while at the same time align all blend outs at the end of the montage rather than at the beginning of the global blend out time