Animation for our game character

Recently I have gotten all of our animation finished. I have made an idle animation and thanks to James he has managed to make a run animation, walk animation, Jump begin, Jump loop, Jump land and lastly pickup. James has made plenty of animation and I did a little work making certain they looped perfectly but their was correctly setup and animated, this gave our game character a great personal style for our game.

So with these animation I took all of them into Unreal Engine in which I created a player animation graph, in which I will assign all the animations. I also have to create a blendspace for the walk. The idea of a blendspace animation is to create a scale in which we say at 0 they player is idle at 35 he is walking at 100 he is running. This allows us to blend these animation to make a smoother change in animation. We then assign this blend space to player velocity in the animation graph.

The last thing I need to do, is set up a state machine this is a system that check when to play an animation. The state machine has to be setup to say when player object is moving on ground play blendspace animation run. But the state system is a bit funny in terms of the setting up an animation. Jumps work where we jump off the ground and then we land. This gives us two separate actions. So I could make a single jump animation but the issue is, that animation would only work if the time in the air while jumping is the same otherwise the animation will loop the jump start while falling. This mean because a jump isn't constant we required three parts, jump begin, jump loop(falling), and jump land. To set this up we create a state that uses if player jumping which check if player has launched off of ground. If yes play Jump begin, then we say when animation jump begin finished play jump loop(falling). The idea behind these first two states is that if we lauch of the ground the height we can jump is the same so we will play that jump animation over that height which might be 300 unit or 400 units. And when we have finished this animation then we know we will be falling as we have reached the peak of our jump. Then that leaves one last state which is very simple which is when landed play jump land. These three states create a jump system that allows the player character to jump in a smooth and familiar system that people are used too.