Pausing Animation Slots

Development Character & Animation
1

Hi all!

I’ve been working on my melee system - it’s pretty basic, but I’m hoping it will be robust and fun. I’ve started doing work on “powering up” attacks, this is all working except for the animation side of it all.

I’m looking to get the melee animation to play up until it hits an AnimNotify at which point, if the player is powering up the attack rather than just doing a quick one, it will pause/stop the upper body slot of the model until the attack happens - at the moment that’s when the player then releases the attack key.

I’ve tried quite a few methods to get there. I can pause the entire mesh, that’s easy enough, but means that the legs don’t move. I can’t get any other pausing/stopping of animations to work though.

Any suggestions/thoughts/improvements I’d love to hear them.

2

So I figured it out - for anyone else who wants to know.

In the anim blueprint, inside the melee state I exposed the “play rate” variable for the animation I was playing (which was a blendspace in this case). I then have a variable which is set to 0 when I want to hold the upperbody still and set to 1 when I want it to play again, this is linked in to the newly exposed variable.

Hope it helps someone else!