Animation

Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Animation

RayTracer(Posted 2003) [#1]
How can one animate a character that is running and reloading at the same time with skeletal animation.


jhocking(Posted 2003) [#2]
I assume you are referring to animation masking (eg. playing a running animation for the lower body while independently playing a reload animation for the upper body.) Animation masking can be achieved using some sort of custom animation system. What I do is use a non-animated model with skeleton for the main character and have the character's animations stored in skeleton-only (ie. no mesh) files. Then I selectively position/rotate/scale bones in the character's skeleton to match bones in the animated skeletons. This way I can (for example) have a running skeleton and a reloading skeleton loaded along with the character and match the lower body of the character to the lower body of the former skeleton while matching the character's upper body to the latter skeleton.


Ricky Smith(Posted 2003) [#3]
The method described by jhocking is very powerful and flexible and allows you to merge all sorts of upper/lower body animation. This is one of the benefits of skeletal animation.

The easy alternative would be to just create a running/reload sequence -trigger this as a one-shot anim when the user hits the reload button - preferable on the last frame of the normal running sequence so there are no transition glitches and then return to the normal running sequence.


RayTracer(Posted 2003) [#4]
Intresting,jhocking can you tell me more acurately how that animation masking works.Thanks