Been banging my head against this for a while and figured someone here must have dealt with it. I'm working on a third-person action game with a fairly involved combat system, light attacks, heavy attacks, dodges, blocks, getting hit, dying, all the usual stuff. The problem I keep running into is deciding when to blend between animations and when to just cut hard.
For most transitions it feels obvious. You don't blend from idle into a walk, you just crossfade and it looks fine. But combat is where it starts falling apart for me. If my character is mid-swing on a heavy attack and the player inputs a dodge, do I blend out of the attack into the dodge? Because right now if I do a short crossfade it looks mushy, the weapon kind of floats weirdly and the character's weight feels wrong. But if I snap to the dodge immediately it can look jarring depending on where in the attack animation we are.
I've started trying to handle it by tagging specific frames in the attack animation as "interruptible" and only allowing a clean exit from those windows, which helps a lot. But now I'm wondering if I'm overcomplicating it and there's a more standard approach people use.
Also separately: what do you do when an enemy hit reaction needs to interrupt whatever the player is doing? Right now I'm just snapping straight to the hit animation and it looks pretty bad when it cuts mid-run. Is a very short blend (like 3-5 frames) actually the answer there, or is it more about having good entry poses baked into the hit animations themselves?
Using Unity with Animator, not a custom graph solution. Happy to hear thoughts from people on other engines too though.