Player Weapon and animations

Blog Entry 1 : Problems

At the beginning of the week, I began to work on the players animations and equipping the player with a pistol. The weapon would show up on the character however no animations for the character with this weapon equipped would play only the animations for unarmed would play. The animations in the anim graph flowed through the locomotion as they should have and appeared to work properly according to the flow. Even with UE logs in place indicating that the animations were in fact being called the problem was still present and no animations would play.

Blog Entry 2 : Solution

After verifying with the UE logs that the animations were in fact being called I began to remove animations from the locomotion thinking that perhaps an animation was broken. I then studied the flow of the locomotion to the main state in the anim graph. The main state flowed into the default action slot which flowed into the IK rig control which then led to the output. Inside of Locomotion the animations for the pistol were all flowing into the cache like they needed to. To continue to trouble shoot this I added some code to the reload animation to allow me to view the animation playing in the preview window if I checked a bool that I named debug reload. 
Using the bool led to the discovery that even in the animation preview window the animations would not play. The issue ended up being that when I connected the new animations I did not pass them through the IK control rig and the correct slot that I had created. I was passing them through the default slot and once I connected to the correct slot and passed it through the IK control rig. Then upon retesting in the preview window when I selected the debug reload and the reload animation played.