Trouble blending Forward and Left Strafe animations in NLA Action Editor

Question

I'm currently having an issue with blending animations using the NLA Action Editor in Blender. I have a character model with four strafe animations (Running Forward, Running Backward, Strafing Left, and Strafing Right), and I'm trying to blend these animations together to create diagonal movements. However, I'm unable to get the blending to work correctly.

Whenever I try to combine two animation strips and change the property for the top strip from Replace to Combine, the blending doesn't look right. For example, when I try to blend the Forward and Left animations, it results in a choppy and incorrect blend.

I've tried adjusting the length of the action strips, changing the blending mode to "Add" or "Multiply", and setting the influence of the action strips correctly. However, none of these solutions seem to work. Check the video clip below to see what I mean

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can blend these animations correctly in the NLA Action Editor? Or any alternatives to achieve what I want?

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!

Here's what the Run animation looks like

Here's what the Strafe_Right animations looks like

This is what it looks like whenever I try to blend both animations by changing the Strip property from Replace to Blend

Answer 1

Hours later, I was finally able to fix this issue and achieve what I wanted.

I don't need to use Combine for the blending property.

What I really needed to tweak and change was the Animation Influence property and toggle it on and change the value to 0.5.

Here's the result of what it should look like

Also, this post really helped me figure it out.