Simplest way to blend separate animation sequences?

Development Character & Animation
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1

I am using animation sequences to animate a skeletal mesh. I am playing them with USkeletalMeshComponent::PlayAnimation(). And so far everything is great, but it would be nice if the animations changed more fluidly.

I know animation montages can be used for a complex animation and allow blending, but it seems dirty putting all of my animation sequences (like idle, run, jump, fall, roll, die, etc) into a single montage and skipping around to different animations within it. I just feel like I’m not using animation montages the way they are intended… Any thoughts or recommendations would be very appreciated.

2

You can make an animation montage for each one of your animations (idle, run, jump, etc…), then call UAnimInstance::Montage_Play() instead of PlayAnimation(). Each montage has a blend-in time and a blend-out time so you can make transitions pretty smooth. On 4.11 you can even specify different blend functions for those.

3

Rantrod you are awesome! You helped me on one of the other questions I had a while ago :slight_smile: Your solution worked very well! I was confused because I tried using Montages a while ago, but whenever I requested the AnimInstance object with GetSingleNodeInstance(), it returned null. Today I realized that I need to play an animation first before GetSingleNodeInstance will return a non-null value. But after I did that I could use Montage_Play and it worked wonderfully… Thanks for the help!!

4

Note that when you call UAnimInstance::Montage_Play, it returns the length of the animation already so you don’t have to look at GetSingleNodeInstance with montages. Montages also have a “GetPlayLength()” function in them. If you already called the montage, you can get the length of the currently playing montage like this:

UAnimMontage *CurrentMontage = AnimInst->GetCurrentActiveMontage();
float Len = CurrentMontage->GetPlayLength();