05. Customizing output of the Animation Graph

The Animation Graph comes with a set of Animation Nodes, that tell the system which animation it should use at a specific time. In previous chapters we’ve used the Select Animation by Bool to select between two outputs depending on a boolean value.

An important note is that the Animation Pin that goes inside the node (drawn like a papercut character), can be the output of any Animation node, these nodes can be concatenated to create complex behavior and switch between nodes.

An example follows:

The output of an Animation node can only be connected to a single animation pin, this is to ensure that the Update sequence runs as intended and doesn’t trigger multiple times. If you want to use the output of the same node multiple times (like using a state machine in different places), you’ll need to use the CacheAnimation node as follows.

This example is illustrative, the same output can be used as many times as needed, as we are only obtaining the cached version of it and only updating it once.

Another point of interest is that each Animation node has settings that can be changed to modify how they behave, let’s take the Play Idle node as an example.

You can see that you can actually change different values like the PlayRate, whether to start the animation from the beginning or another playback position and even if we should loop the animation. This variables can actually be made dynamic by selecting on the checkbox that is to the right, which will create a new PIN on the node, which you can then bind to dynamic variables and logic into the Animation Graph

In this specific case, we could change how quick the Idle animation would play, and make it run slower if the character is tired or even pause it entirely.

There are multiple nodes and settings, to ensure the animations work as intended with the least amount of code as possible.