Best Practice / Setup for Character Animations and Additives?

Oblivion2500 · Aug 2018

I have been researching animations and additives for UE4. I'm making a game with 9 characters (humanoid) that share universal animations (using animation re-targeting). There are 14 weapons. Some are one-handed while others are two-handed weapons (as well as some firearms). I have created animations with additives in mind. I created the following non-additive animations:

Idle Standing Unarmed
Some attack animations for each weapon
Death animations

That's it.
Then I created a bunch of additive animations: (note: I want the character to be able to walk/run/crouch)

Sneaking pose
Equipped weapon poses
Aim Offset poses for every single weapon and also included one for the head

I realized that it's not working quite right, I can't use additives for blend spaces. So, that makes it more difficult to add into an animation blueprint. Should I have created an individual animation for the following:

Idle Crouched Unarmed
Idle Standing Armed with One-Handed Weapon
Idle Standing Armed with Two-Handed Weapon

I also downloaded Unreal Tournament Editor from the Epic Game Launcher to check how they did the animation setup. Under the restricted folder > animations. You can see that it's kind of disorganized and confusing. However, if you go to the universal folder and go to 3rd person folder. You can see that they have the walking/running animations as the additive_base and have the armed/aiming/attack animations be additives, but the equipped/armed animations are not set up to be additives. How did Epic Games set this up? I tried looking at the animation blueprint and it was a crazy mess of confusion. Do you have advice or an example of a setup? Am I going on the right path? Am I relying on additive too much?