PLEASE HELP! Setting up an animation blendspace with two directionals?

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hey there!
I’m relatively new to Unreal and am attempting to use an animation blendspace to alternate between various movement animations depending on whether my killer whale model is going up, down, right, or left.

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I set up my variables in the animation event graph to where my X variable is determined by ‘calculate direction’, and was happy with the results. However, I can’t seem to get the same results on the Y axis: the whale just flops around without any rhyme or reason. I’m not really sure what I’m doing wrong here?
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2

It seems you want a directional blendspace. See if this tutorial helps.

This one is oriented to velocity (player always facing the direction of movement).

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3

Thanks for the response! I’ve seen both of these videos and my movement works great from left to right. My issue is that these don’t seem to work for up and down movement and I’m not sure why. Thanks!

4

Got it now. The vertical movement should be set as Z axis if your Player Character is set to Swimming (use the node Set movement mode inside anim BP or Get Movement Component >Set Movement Mode inside Character BP). Make sure in properties, your character movement component is set to Can Swim.

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5

The movement component is set to “Can Swim”
(Proof I’m not crazy)

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I added Set Movement Mode to the animeBP and set it to swimming, but it doesn’t appear the behavior has changed. I’m still dealing with the same issue. Is this set correctly? Excuse the spaghetti

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Thank you so much for looking at this!

6

Also, here’s a video kind of showing whats going on. It behaves this way with regardless of whether X or Y is plugged in…or both. Z just makes it throw out of of the animations if it moves to one side, as it should with the turning left or right anims. If that makes sense?

7

You need to add move up / down input and correspondent logic. Perhaps you don’t need to move you character sideways with bi-directional blendspaces. You may want to use ‘orient rotation to movement’ in Movement Component and use a unidirectional blendspace. If so, I believe this tutorial may help you.
How To Create Swimmable Water With Functional Swimming Animations - Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial - YouTube

8

Not sure I’m understanding you correctly. I want the character rotation to follow the mouse without needing separate input keys to move up and down in the water column, and I want to use up, down, right, and left turning animations when the character’s rotation changes. Is this not possible to set up?

9

Yes, you can control direction with mouse (camera). To do that, use the camera inputs (commonly ‘Look Up’ and ‘Turn’, or any custom name) to control Pitch and Yaw. Make sure movement mode set as swimming and orient rotation to movement set to true.

10

Sorry, was at work.
I’m not having issues getting it to follow the cursor; it already does that. I’m just struggling with triggering the correct animation to play. I’d like to do it without needing to program a key bind for moving up and down

11

I fixed the issue. I just needed to store the value of the Y rotation and subtract it from the rotation after a delay. Thanks for the help!

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