Accessing State Weights From Code
Recently, I’ve be doing a lot of work to optimize animation blueprints in UE4 by moving all of the event graph functionality into C++. One particular problem I ran into was that I was unable to ‘Fast Path Enable’ several blend nodes due to their alpha values being driven by state weights from various state machines within the graph.
I quickly found out that you can easily get the weight of any state from the graph in code, but you needed to know the index of both your state machine and your animation state. The animation instance didn’t offer any method of getting a state index from just a name, but the FBakedAnimationStateMachine struct does have a FindStateIndex() function that does just that. Below is an example of a simple function that I added to my custom AnimInstance that returns a state’s index based on the name of the state.
To get the index of a given state machine, you can use GetStateMachineIndex() within your AnimInstance. That can then be passed in to the above function with the name of your state to retrieve the index. From there, it’s a matter of calling GetInstanceStateWeight() with the index of both the state machine and your animation state to get the current blend weight of your state.