I’ve got a skeletal animation blueprint (SkeletalMesh component) controlling various properties of a character that is meant to do some custom head tracking. Specifically, I already have the ability to apply a blended idle animation based on a direction I want a character’s attention to be focussed on.
However, what I wish to do is some adjustment of various bones to get the character to look directly at his target, as exactly as possible.
What I need to be able to do is once various animations are already applied, but before I go to make the final tweak to a few bones to make this happen, I want to know either the current transforms of the bones, or alternately sockets attached to those bones just before I make the final alterations.
Neither of these things seem to be possible.
I have no ability to query the bones of a SkeletalMesh from a blueprint at any time, much less very specifically during operation of the AnimGraph when I actually need it.
I can query a socket’s transform during operation of the AnimGraph, but this does me no good, as it appears that the transform is likely from the prior update, and is where the socket will be after all transforms are done. I need a bone related transform very specifically after a set of animation blends and so on have been applied, but before the final bone adjustment for tracking a point in space is performed, so that the final orientation of the character’s gaze is dead-on. In other words, just before I do a ModifyBone, I need to do a QueryBone to find out how much to ModifyBone.
Shorter: In the AnimGraph operation I can adjust a bone’s transform, or replace it, but I can’t query what it is at that point in the AnimGraph or fake this behaviour with sockets on, say, the head of my character and other relevant bones.
It may be that this is possible in C++ (in fact, given engine source, I’m pretty sure this is possible, since it’s likely how the built-in LookAt AnimGraph node operates).
I was wondering if there was a reasonable way to do this in-line bone query in the AnimGraph. It would make this, and other custom versions of IK experimentation easier.