Procedurally rotate bone while playing animation

Hi everyone!

I’ve been playing with UE for forever now, but never really messed too much with outside assets— mostly focusing on game logic blueprints. I’ve recently started getting into making stuff in Blender, and have successfully imported my first skeletal mesh with animations.

I’m not sure if I can even do this, so I figured before I go back and change my animations, I’d ask. I have a little mushroom enemy that, during the attack animation, I scale the top bone up and down on the Z axis to make it look like it’s spitting something out.

image

What I would like to do is play the current animation while procedurally rotating the bone so that, instead of rotating the entire actor, the mesh kind of just bends towards the player in whatever direction they may be.

My attempt at this was getting the player location and the bone location (using the GetSocketLocation node, which I read was possible on one of the other forum posts), and getting the FindLookAtRotation, then storing that in a variable to access in my animation blueprint.

From there, I used the transform bone node to try to apply the rotation while the animation was playing. This did nothing.

So that’s where I am. Looking for some guidance on what I should look into to get this to work.
Thanks!

What’s the order of operation in the animation BP?
Could be something is overriding the change.

Whole you are at it, you may want to read up the engine documentation on Fast Path.

And blueprint interfaces.

Also, maybe the animation debug docks.

And on top of that,
You should check/film the action with slmo on, so as to be sure the bone rotation (or whatever) is working on not.