Unreal engine has its quirks. A big one I found is the idea of “additive” animations (see this). Which essentially take the animation you made and subtracts it from a reference pose or animation. This is how you can easily blend ontop of an animation instead of getting some weird median between two existing animations. I use this technique all the time, in the weapons I use it to add a fire animation ontop of the idle animation so you dont get weird glitching from recoil back to a relaxed state. In the bots I use it for everything that pretty much isn’t a “movement” state. Such as pitch tiling and hit reactions. In this case the hit reactions seem to be blending poorly with the rest of the animations.

I also added in bullet tracers which add a much needed element of feedback to shooting so you don’t feel like the gun is disconnected from the rest of the world. The problem here was that I was mixing a bunch of domains at the same time. When adding an animation there’s local space, and mesh space, and if you throw some IK stuff into the mix you hit issues where a vector of length 3 units in one space does not equal the same number of units in another space. In this case I was adding a bunch of animations in local space ontop of my IK rig which was manipulating everything in mesh space. This was harder to catch because I naturally assumed that each operation was isolated (akin to keeping each part of a math problem in parenthesis) however it seems like when ever I start playing with bones the manipulation strategy seems to stick onto the bones. So if I messed with something in local space, the next addition is assumed to be local space, so by switching everything to mesh space its working fine:

In other news I somehow made the mags that the bots spawn on reload really big, which I think is probably a similar domain transfer issue.

Finally after all that talk about control rigs and modular rigs I’m hitting issues animating the mantis bot.

There are things called “pole” controls (see this) which act as a place for elbows to point to (in this case the robotic knees) and for some reason unreal put them VERY far away so they’re pretty un-weidly to handle. I’m going to have to remake the control rig for this model in order to animate it properly. However even with that kinda broken, half finished animation I think I’m on track to hit what I want from the mantis bot.