BlendSpace 1D and StateMachine

To allow blending between animations, we need to set up a thing called a BlendSpace.

For going between the Idle animation (standing still) into the run animation I have two BlendSpaces, one for each of the two weapons, as they use different idle and movement animations.

Below I am showing the Sword and Shield one, though the Broadsword one is much the same.

To fully make use of the blendspace, we need to implement a StateMachine. This can control the animation BlendSpace based on the speed of the character, when it's all been set up correctly.

Here we see in the Anim Blueprint the Speed of the character is being determined and passed to a variable.

This variable is then used by the State Machine to control the blend of the BlendSpace player
setting up BlendSpace Player, set to use the idle/run blendspace we set up earlier.

The blendspace can be used to control blending between any two or more animations, not just between different run speeds.

Imagine we had a game where the character had to reach out to the left and right by varying degrees, we could have a reach left, a middle and reach right. If we set these into the blendspace we could control the degrees by which the player reached out in either direction, allowing for fine control.