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Combining two animations together
Hello again,
I have another issue still unresolved. How to combine different animations together to produce multiple movements. For example I need "hold a gun" and "shoot" animations for upper torso. For lower torso I need "run", "walk", "stand" animations. How should I go about combining lower body custom animation with upper body without having to solely make every single one in 3DMax.
I know this is possible (by probably assigning one set of keyframes to one group of bones and another to other group), though this sounds very complex.
Does kW support anything like this? If no whats the best solution. Thanks
kW Animation currently lets
kW Animation currently lets you blend animations using a built-in component. It does not have a component built-in for feathering (which is what you want to do). However, it would be simple to implement such a component; it would drive each of the attached sub-animations, and simply select the output key frame for each bone from one of the sub-animations, based on how you want to feather the animations. You could even blend some key frames that might belong to "both" animations. The most complex part is figuring out how to author the feathering map: how does the artist tell the system which bone to take from which animation?
Another question, jwatte. I
Another question, jwatte. I would like to add ragdoll for my character model. Any advice how I can integrate that with kW animation?
Thanks.
kW Animation is for forward
kW Animation is for forward kinematics -- driven body parts. If you want to ragdoll, you need to turn each bone into a joint, and each limb into a collision hull with a rigid body, and then simulate the entire thing using physics. At that point, any animation package is turned off (although the shader/rendering part can still be used).
Once you have a simulation (using JigLibX or something similar), then you can simply get the position/orientation of each joint/body in the simulation, and copy that to the appropriate bone index, before generating the pose. You could even turn this into an IAnimationSource to make it fit seamlessly with the existing animation/rendering code, but you'd still need to come up with the collision/simulation code on your own.