So as far as I understand for animation blueprints you must set variables and use transitions to play animations. This makes it really painful for something like a hit animation, or a one-off animation for an item discovery that only plays once, since you have to set up transitions for every other state to these one-offs.
Is there a way to play one-off animations without setting up a ton of transitions?
For example in unity there’s an “any state” node that can transition from any state to the one-off, or you can call a specific animation directly from code.
There is no AnyState like in Unity.
But in many common setup there is a central idle state which everything branches off, which reduces the number of transition to create.
However, you can also just play a montage.
This is probably what you want.
The montage slot will be played from any state.
You play the slot in the AnimGraph and can play an animation in the slot in the event graph.
I think what you are looking for is, the play anim montage node. You should be able to call it from any blueprint that you are using to cause the damage. When you make you montage, just make sure you set yourself back to your Idle or base animation. You’re character should play the montage and go back to his animbp