Anim BP Custom blend, Delayed Freeze time/frame mismatch

In Animation BP, state machine, transition “Custom” blend logic, on “Get Source State Pose” and “Get Destination State Pose” nodes there is an option to choose how should be the source/destination states handled. They can continuously play (in a case of looping states), freeze or delayed freeze.

The “Delayed freeze” option has a numeric field to setup how many frames to cache. The problem is that the numbers somehow don’t seem to correspond to observation. I tried to measure this with a stopwatch and to me it looks like the “Frames to Cache Pose” isn’t actually frames but seconds, e.g. 150 “frames” seems to play a cached animation for 1,5 seconds (but using stopwatch this could be off and jumping to wrong conclusions :slight_smile: ).

There doesn’t seem to be documentation on “Blend graphs”, so it’s a bit hard to figure out a feature and also come to a conclusion that something is bug, but another thing that seems to be a bit strange is how “Delayed freeze” works with the destination state. Sure it works as the name of the setting suggests - destination animation plays for a while and then freezes (with the same time/frame mismatch as described above). But shouldn’t this work inverted with the destination state? By inverted I mean, shouldn’t the destination state animation be frozen for some time and then start playing (for which “Delayed Play” instead of “Delayed Freeze” would be a better name). Somehow can’t figure out a case where how it currently works would be useful (though that may be down to poor imagination :slight_smile: ), but I would find “Delayed Play” quite useful.
The easiest way I can think of for this to work would be if user could setup certain amount of frames and when transition is “entered”, destination state is frozen for as long as necessary for those setup frames to start play before transition is “finished”. E.g. transition takes 1second, “Delayed Play” has 3 frames setup and so for the first 27 frames the destination state is frozen and 3 frames before the transition is finished, the destination state starts to be ticked and evaluated.

Another glitch seems to be that if you slow down the preview (via the controls in the Viewport inside Anim BP editor), cached poses seem to play at default realtime speed. But this one is really only minor glitch.

Hey ,

Any chance I can get a screenshot of your custom transition (try to include the details for the Get Destination State Pose node)?

-.

Hi , here is a screenshot, plus I realize my description sounds a bit (or more) confusing, so there is also a little scheme of what I’m trying to do with that custom blend.

One could use transition animation which ends with the exact same pose that the next state starts in, but in practice this is quite hard to maintain in the long run, there always seems to be some bones off by a degree, either due to compression or updates to animations which didn’t make to the other animation in perfect condition, so a few frame blend seems like a good solution (the transition animation may end with the 3 frames that the next animation starts with).

Thanks a lot for looking into these less often used features.

Hey ,

Just a heads up that I have an email out to the devs regarding your issue. I’ll keep you up to date with any responses.

-.

Great, thanks for all the information.

I poked at the email thread and got an answer to one of your questions. They have confirmed that Frames to Cache Pose is truly in frames. Awaiting more info though.

Hey ,

So the sense that I’m getting from the engineers is that this feature(Custom Blend Logic) was a very specific request from some devs and we don’t even use it in house. The engineers mentioned that they don’t really think it’s powerful enough for practical use.

However, I’ve entered a report (UE-15820) to improve the clarity and functionality of Custom Blend Logic.

-.

Oh, that’s how it is. Please let the engineers know they are underestimating the feature :slight_smile: , it could be really useful if it would get some love in the documentation department + fixes and small feature updates.

this is the best example of custom blending i have ever found :slight_smile: thanks for this :smiley: