Hello,
this is a question about how do you, my fellow programmers, solve this problem in your project.
In my project I have an animation BP with an animation machine comprised of many states. Every state naturally contains a blending tree with various blending nodes (blend by enum, blend by bool, blend by int).
These nodes blend animations together using some exposed property in underlying AnimInstance, for example using enum property ‘Level’ which defines information about action “height” (or “level”), i.e. low-height shooting, mid-height shooting, etc. This property is general enough that it can describe ‘level’ of any action a player can do. Therefore it also defines height (level) of climbing, jumping, etc. I am sharing this property among various states – I have multiple animation states which handle various player actions, and these states are using same exposed property to blend their respective animations in their animation trees.
What happens if one state is blending into another state, both are using same property and that property needs to change its value? For example: My character was climbing on a high obstacle and continues with shooting at a low-height, therefore ‘Level’ property changes its value from ‘high’ to ‘low’ when I cause the state to transition into a new one. Yet, the still current ‘old’ state starts to blend different animation internally because it automatically reacts on a change in ‘Level’ property. It always results in a few frames long visible glitch because I can see a few frames from a different ‘level’ climbing animation.
It is apparent that the easy and quick solution would be not to share same property in multiple animation states. However it leads to a rather uncomfortable “explosion” of properties where I need to have ‘ClimbLevel’, ‘ShootLevel’, ‘FallLevel’, etc. That repeats for any other possibly shared property.
It would be so nice if one can forbid blending nodes to update their connected properties when state is in transition out. I don’t know about such functionality in UE, though.
Have you ever encountered a problem like this? What is you solution? Is there any more elegant way?
Thank you for any comments.
-Martin