Blending Achieved!

I have finally solved an issue that I had since I started animating the character! The blending aspect! Before I had issues with the character not blending animations correctly. For example, if the character initiated the reload animation and then started moving, the model would glide until the reload animation was finished which then would cause the run animation to initiate. The two animations would never blend and the same goes for any animation that only involves the top half of the body like shooting. However, I did some more research on the topic and found out a tiny bit of information that I was apparently missing. I had my set up right in the character animtree involving the two animation nodes: tophalfslot and fullbodyslot. It turns out just like my professor had stated, that I needed to specify the bones in the properties that the tophalfslot node would be initiating the animations from. Once I did that and changed the script files so that only the tophalfslots would initiate animations for the top half of the body (like shooting, reloading, etc) and the fullbodyslot took care of the full body animations, I was golden! Everything is blending well now. You can see an example of it in the screenshot below.** Just pay attention to the legs animating while the reload animation is playing.

Reloading and Running! YES!

I also started on developing the blood particle for human blood. I created the texture of the blood using a blood brush that I downloaded from a source and then imported that into UDK to create the material. The material is not the best it could be, but it is sufficient. I quickly ran into a problem that I am still unsure as how to solve though. The material is correct but the particle system is spitting out a black version of the material. I have no idea why but I'm currently looking into it.