The normal route to animations is using animation blueprints, with statemachines and the lot. However, I have made some simple animations for a bow and the hands in a FPS, (Draw, hold, shoot). They overlap, or they switch outside of view. Hence, I do not need blendspaces, or complicated controls.
Setting up the logic and playing the animations directly from the firstpersoncharacter blueprint was quite easy to make work, with Play Animation + delays.
My question is: Is there something about using the character blueprint to drive the animations directly that is inherently bad? Limitation? Performance issues?
The animation blueprint setup is inherently a lot more powerful. You can blend between animations, have control over the skeleton, and the pipeline is honestly a lot cleaner and faster. Using animations in your character bp ESPECIALLY with delays become difficult to work around when you want to add more nodes/code before/after the animations. I would think it would also at some point have a performance drop when having a large blueprint even if it’s minute at the end. Theres a lot of great tutorials online on Animation BPs, if you’re looking to add animations to your character/set up state machines and what not
Thank you for your answer! It is the dilemma, use a rought system that I understand and give me the results I need, or use the dedicated system that I haven’t learned in depth yet. There isn’t at least a reason why it couldn’t work, or that it will break down, as I read from your answer. Then again, at some point I will probably have to learn aniBP to make something else work. Well, I’m off to google the delay-thing, I’ve seen many people warn against using it for some reason.
Using delay will stop the code from continuing for X amount of time. Thats the problem with delay. Of course use it when you need to but the obvious problem is that it will stop your code from continuing. Good luck though!
With much experience since, I will answer my old question if others have the same question.
Unless you need blendspaces, running the animations directly from a diy ‘statemachine’ in blueprint is both fast and efficient. I have done this for over 40 enemies now.