Blending Between Animations

hi there,
I just recently wrote an animation system for a game I was working on. What I did was create an actual blending state in my animation controller. So if you wanted to go from idle to walk you take the last frame the idle animation was in before the player pressed a key to move and you interpolate for a set amount of time to the first frame of the walk animation. This worked for me in achieving smooth transitions between the animations that needed it without an artist creating these transitions. I Hope this helps!

-Andrew

Quote:

Original post by Andybean9 hi there, I just recently wrote an animation system for a game I was working on. What I did was create an actual blending state in my animation controller. So if you wanted to go from idle to walk you take the last frame the idle animation was in before the player pressed a key to move and you interpolate for a set amount of time to the first frame of the walk animation. This worked for me in achieving smooth transitions between the animations that needed it without an artist creating these transitions. I Hope this helps! -Andrew

Interesting. So you don't blend between the two moving sets of animations. The animation for walk doesn't start until the blend has finished? That kind of makes more sense. Do you think it looks better than blending between two moving sets of animations?

Thanks for the reply.

Hello again,

I just tried your method out to compare and I think they both look pretty good. Your implementation is certainly a lot easier than mine (trying to blend between two running animations), so I think I will go with it.

Thanks for your help!

No problem! glad I could be of help

-Andrew

Animadead (http://animadead.sf.net) is a library meant for just such a thing. In Animadead animations are just the set of frames for the entire animation, and a blend is used to get the pose between two frames. That same blend feature can be used to blend between any two poses, and therefore the result of 2 seperate animations can be blended (with a weight you define) to create a new pose. In this nature, it is heirarchial. This doesn't necessarily answer the best way to blend the animations, but it will make it a lot easier to implement.