Idea Generation for Computer Games - Switching Weapons: Booleans, Events and AnimNotifys.

To physically make the switching of the weapons function, a group of booleans, events and anim notifys were needed. All of the aforementioned nodes items are important to create a cross blueprint communication, allowing the AnimNotifys to be cast across to the animation blueprint's event graph.

These ultimately act to show a visible representation of whether the character is in 'Sword 1 Mode' or 'Sword 2 Mode', by switching the visibility of the sheathed and unsheathed weapons.
For example, when switching from Sword 1 to Sword 2, an AnimNotify is set mid animation, which when referred to in the animation blueprint, is set to call a sheath command in the character blueprint, this would then be assigned to the primary weapon (sword 1) and the shield via a 'set hidden in game' node with another 'set hidden in game' node applied to the sheathed variants of the primary weapon and shield, with the difference being that the set hidden node is unticked, allowing the meshes to appear sheathed
.
The following call would then be made to make the secondary weapon visible in line with the point at which the appropriate AnimNotify has been placed within the draw animation for the secondary weapon.
This can then be reversed to switch back to the primary weapon, with the correct AnimNotifys in the right places.

The resulting in game shots represent the post switch effect of hiding and showing the appropriate meshes at the correct times within animations, and referring across to another stance which was created using another BlendSpace identical to the primary, but using the appropriate animation files for the weapon type.

This process as a whole did confuse me initially and is not perfect, as this is both my first implementation process of a character within a game engine and there is no solid sheathing animation for the shield, with this in mind I cannot fix this right now without taking extra time to extensively change the animations provided to me within a software like Maya.
As I have little knowledge right now of actual animation cleanup, I will be leaving the animation as it currently stands with a view to possibly alter the animation or make my own at a point further down the line.
Looking positively upon this criticism, I have learned through this process ways of switching equipped weapons, which I would be able to apply in a multitude of game types, not only melee based third person action games but shooters and some elements of the role playing genre too.