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Animation Blueprints make use of various nodes within their graphs to perform operations on input poses, such as blending, direct bone manipulation, and more. There are a few distinct types of animation nodes provided in the engine including events, blend nodes, skeletal controllers, space nodes, and conversion nodes.
EventGraph Nodes
Nodes in this graph are used to process incoming data that in turn is used to drive the pose data in the AnimGraph .
AnimGraph Nodes
Using data from the EventGraph , nodes in this graph determine the actual frame-by-frame pose to use for the character.
Pins and Properties
Animation nodes can have pins (both input and output) which values can be passed to in the EventGraph or AnimGraph and properties which can be edited in the Details panel. Pins can be either data pins identical to those found on nodes in regular Blueprints which take in data from variables or pure functions, or they can be pose pins which are similar to exec pins in regular Blueprints in that they determine the flow of execution.
Data pins are actually properties like any other and are exposed in the Details panel. These can be toggled between being used as a data pin on the node in the graph and being a simple property. When exposed as a data pin, the property is only modifiable in the graph by linking a value to it. When not exposed as a data pin, properties can only be modified through the Details panel.
Above a Blendspace Player node has properties in the Details panel that can be set as pins. The X and Y coordinate pins which make up the Speed property of our Blendspace as well as Play Rate and Loop are exposed on the node since they are checked inside the Details panel.
Animation Node Pose Watching
Animation Node Pose Watching allows you to see a representation of the pose being generated at any point in the AnimGraph dynamically. You can also have multiple Pose Watches active at once allowing you to compare poses at different points to find the exact point in which any errors in your current pose are introduced.
To enable this, inside your AnimGraph , Right-click on on a node that contains pose data and select Toggle Pose Watch .
You can also specify different colors for each of your watched poses by clicking the icon in the upper left corner of the node.
You can Remove Pose Watch from the color picker window or by reselecting Toggle Pose Watch on the Animation Node.