Sync animation frames to mouse movement

Looking for a little guidance if possible. My game is completely centered around a rigged character that will utilize many different “swinging” animations (think Golf) based on distance to a target. However, I have zero need for traditional movement controls as the character will always be aligned to the ball. What I’m trying to setup via blueprint is a control system that simply allows the player to control the swing animation by moving their mouse back and forth along the X or Y axis.

EX: Player clicks on character to initialize start of swing, then as the mouse is pulled back the back swing animation plays frame by frame in sync at the rate the mouse is moved. Then the player pushes the mouse forward in opposite direction for the down swing motion and animation.

About a year ago I was able to mock together this control system for Unity via C# in just a few days using OnMouseDown for swing start and Vector3 mouseDelta to set the input position. I then compared the last mouse coordinate to the mouseDelta.x position to determine direction of mouse movement & animation to play (down or back swing). An animation.Crossfade was used to blend the transition between back and down swings. Lastly, I normalized the animation time so that it synced to the current mouse position based on screen width.
animation [“Backswing”].normalizedTime = 3.0f * Input.mousePosition.x / Screen.width - 1;

In my case, since the main character is stationary at all times other than aim by camera rotation, would I be better off using a Pawn rather than Character? Also, would this be easier to achieve via AnimMontage?? I would like to use the UE4 anim blending for back to down swing transition but again it seems to be targeted at more traditional character control (walk → jog → run).

Being quite new to UE4 I hoping for some direction at tackling this in a blueprint because to be honest I’m a bit lost. I’ve scoured answerhub and other forums for a similar topic but seemingly every animation & control posting is related to more traditional character control schemes.

Thanks in advance,

Uvhausen

Could someone be kind enough of to point me in the right direction or at least a good starting point?

Thank you,

Uvhausen