This week consisted of animation retargeting and implementing the animations aside from that. 

The animation retargeting was a pain. I haven't used it before in unreal, and had to learn a lot of things that videos honestly weren't really helping much with since they were often making assumptions that didn't apply here. Thankfully going through Unreal's documentation on IK Rigs and animation retargeting carefully ended up getting me through it - but it was still a slog to get through and had a lot of troubleshooting and learning that I had to do before it finally clicked. Once it did, the pieces snapped together. There is some funkiness going on with the animations still, but the biggest culprits weren't actually visible while playing and the ones that are should be fixable with some minor tweaks. 

Secondly was implementing the other animations, which required blueprinting and utilizing blend spaces.  This wasn't as bad as the retargeting's first attempts was, and pretty easy by contrast. It took a bit of time to get them in and make sure they were functioning, but for them it was just a time sink without much in the way of issues cropping up. Only one issue has presented itself and that was with applying attack animations; I applied them in the same manner as the death animations, except by placing them in the player damage section. While the death animations play properly as expected, the attack animations override all other animations for some reason. I'm sure I likely just overlooked something, however, so I'll just have to do a bit of searching to figure it out.

Blend space for the shadows

Animation blueprint for the shadows - Babau utilizes the same blueprint, albeit for a different actor. 

Segment of the actor blueprints for the death animation