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How to avoid Spagettie AnimGraph?

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I got this question from twitter. The state machine is cool but how do we avoid this? UE4 animation system is very good to use when you have small sets of animations but it can be cumbersome if you have many many many variation of the animations. If you want to see all the animations you want to look, this is how it can look. As much as state machine and the transition look cool to visualize, it doesn't help if they are too many of them because at this point, you won't be able to see what's going on. So what do you do? First thing I mention when I see this is our ability system. Disclaimer - Note that I'm not a gameplay engineer at Epic, so my knowledge on the current ability system is very outdated. (I did work on gameplay during Gears of War times) But to relay this idea of what to do to avoid the spaghetti states it is required to mention the ability system. Second, I'm not on Fortnite, so I don't know how their real implementation is. This is jus
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Master pose vs copy pose vs mesh merge in UE4

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Since I get this question so often, I'm just writing quick summary for each. When you have different parts of bodies, and you want to allow players to pick which part they want, we have multiple choices, and people are wondering what are the main differences. Say you have head, upper body, lower body, and how do you allow them to pick and what are the differences? 1. Master Pose Component - This is Blueprint callable action that you set Child->SetMaseterPoseComponent(Body) , then Body becomes the master of Child , which means Child will follow whatever Body does. - Behind of scene, Child does not have any bone transform buffer and it doesn't run any animation system even if you set AnimBP on the Child , and it just uses Body's bone transform buffer when rendered. This makes very light weight attachment system. Only component that has to run animation is Body , and all attachment will just use Body's bone transform. - This does not reduce render cost. You
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What do I do when this happens?

UE4 animation system includes a lot of stuff as you can see from here , so I'd like to explain some situational examples. Here is a character, what do I use when I want him to walk? We have lots of locomotion examples, but usually you use AnimGraph from Animation Blueprint. Animation Blueprint consists of two graph. One is AnimGraph and second is EventGraph. What are the differences? Animation Graph is the one running animation system and outputs bone transform, where as Event Graph runs BEFORE Animation Graph and update inputs using awesome blueprint system. Because AnimGraph works with bone transforms, it is expensive and a bit complicated. But basically when you have character with random states such as running or flying or crouch, it is easy to use Anim Graph. Do I use state or blend node? State or blend nodes are almost same thing except they provide different features in terms of UX and some detail features - i.e. custom transitions. You can almost implement same
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Hello, This is my new blog, and this is just a test post. Hope I can be diligent enough to write more stuff. :) --Lina,
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