Animation blending is the process of playing multiple animations on a single mesh at the same time. Some key things to note about animation blending are that the associated playing animations must be carefully balanced against one another; otherwise, this will result in artifacts such as clipping or impossible skeletal orientations.

We use animation blending to prevent what is commonly known as animation pops. These animation pops happen when the position of a bone becomes discontinuous as the bone moves. Typically, this shows up as an abrupt change in pose in a time span that is unbelievable to an observer.

Blending helps alleviate pops by smoothing out abrupt skeletal changes as well as allowing our soldier to blend together two animations that were not authored to be played back to back.