Throwing animation while running - Layered Blend per bone

Hey guys, and welcome to the first blog post on the development of "Cabbageball" - as we were working on the core mechanics, we wanted to implement a throw while running animation - for that, we used the "Layer Per Bone" node on the Anime blueprint. But after the initial setup, we encountered an error regarding blending the bones. The following looked like this:

After some research online - we have managed to get it to look like this:

So let's see how to make it the correct way:

First, let's start with the essential connections needed to connect animation - in this case, running & throw animations.

1. Connecting your locomotion node and use a "New cached save pose..." - rename it to your liking (in this "Base Locomotion")

2. "Call cached pose" node and connect it to your Montage animation

3. Cache the to nodes and rename it (Upper body )

Now with this out of the way, we can start working on the Blending part

1. Take the cached poses and connect them to a "Layered Blend per bone node" (LBPB)

2. Connect the output of the layered blend node to the output pose

In the LBPB node, expand the layer setup and add the bone name where you would like the animation to start blending.

The "Blend Depth" controls the amount of blending the two animations share. The higher the number, the higher the blend.

Now for the critical step :

In order for the blend to work properly, we also need to tell it where not to blend from( this was the thing we missed out on the first time around)

For that, create two more arrays with the -1 blend depth from the bone you don't want to blend. (In our case, the thigh bones)

That way, Unreal knows where to blend and where not to, and we can all continue living our life :)

We hope this help.

If you have any feather questions, feel free to leave a message, and we will try our best to help our fellow devs.