Progress is progress no matter how small your steps are. Have to keep telling myself that.

For state chains too messy or numerous to simply connect to a default state, a convenience tool for organizing transitions between groups of states is the state alias (the states with the purpler frames), a blank state that serves as a long-distance portal to another state. An alias can also be the reference of more than one state.

My model for the jump and fall states rely on a Boolean variable to gatekeep animation paths. If my character is ascending at greater than 100cm velocity (see slide 4) from its previous surface, it will enter an animated jumping state, and when ascension stops, will play a falling state with looped animation before landing onto the floor.

Fetching your character information through a variable node can save you organized space throughout your blueprinting journey, because you will no longer have to make new Cast nodes at other nodes' target slots.

Beneath this sentence, on the left is a node sequence for the system to measure the player's speed and velocity per frame and set ABP blueprint values to play the accordingly immersive animations.

On the right is a minimal sequence of Boolean trigger nodes. The system checks the movement of target player, sees if they are falling via built-in detection node, and ticks the falling Boolean variable true or false.

The shrinking phenomenon is a consequence of the landing animation being an additive animation, meaning it was designed to be played on top of other animations than alongside them.

The Apply Additive node combines two animation poses - a base-normal pose (usually the default animation) and an additive pose - into a blended pose that incorporates both animations. In the node, alpha value determines the degree of blending. A value of 0 favors the base pose, while 1 favors the additive pose.

To not make my land state cause the player mesh to shrink and reappear, I make Apply Additive fetch my locomotion cache containing the player's current state, then connect my landing animation node to the additive slot. Keeping the alpha value as 1 ensures the landing pose overlaps the default pose before state transition.

Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.

One last tidbit: priority numbers in transitions govern the order of animations played. For example, a walking-to-jumping and walking-to-falling transition go true at the same time, because the system defines the player as 'falling' via Boolean variable, the falling animation plays over the jumping animation entirely. Setting the falling state transition to a lesser priority ensures the jump state's conditions are checked and initiated before the falling state's.