Ideas for new animation system

[QuantumCoderQC]

Thank you for all the insights. Really appreciate it.

@knowledgenude

I think we all can plan a better and more user friendly way

Absolutely, That is the goal of this discussion.

@knowledgenude

Action 3 is the result of mixing the two previous animations and it can mixed with many other animations infinitely

Yes, this is also my idea. To have no limit on blending of animations. That is, the 3 nodes that I used can be used in any order and in any number, since they all take in 2 Action inputs and output one Action.

@knowledgenude

My reason to ignore the mask in the previous steps is because this blending of animation would not affect the armature at all, nor the previous animations, because each node can have a single animation stored to it

I did not completely get the point here. But, the reason why I wanted to have bone masking is for the cases when you want to blend only certain animation transforms while keeping the rest the same.

For example blending a run animation with gun holding animation. While this can be achieved with simply having only legs animated in one animation and only hands in the other, bone masking is still a nice option to have.

Also, bone masking isn’t that difficult to implement.

@knowledgenude

Edit: i will try to implement HFSM over that later

That is very cool. But for right now, we could keep the discussion to a bit low level. That is just blending animations and playing them. Switching to other animation trees could come later.

@timodriaan

This sounds very cool! I like the transition node that (if I understand it correctly) allows you to seemlessly change between animation states like running or climbing for example, right?

Yes, it allows for switching between two animation trees. For context, it is the simplest form of animation state machine. Just switches animation tree from one to other on input and starts the new animation tree from time t = 0

@timodriaan

On the other hand using the logic trees is much simpler and maybe there are even good ways to combine the animation nodes with logic nodes (that’s probably the better approach).

I too think this is a better approach. This also makes new users understanding nodes a bit easier, rather than to lean a new UI altogether.

@timodriaan

A priority system sounds really helpful indeed!

I agree that a priority system sounds good, but I don’t think its a substitute for a mask system. Since in a mask system, even if all of the bones are animated, you have to option to choose a particular set of bones for blending.

Whereas, if you only had a priority system, you might have to create a copy of the original animation track and then remove all the unwanted bones.

@knowledgenude

Idk exactly. For me the blend input is the same as the factor input we see in shader/mix vector nodes (both are lerp). I got confused because of the transition node in the image.

I believe the image I put up gave some wrong ideas. To make it clear, you can use any number of blend nodes and in any combination. A transition node is optional but can be used any number of times and anywhere in the node tree.

@knowledgenude

A transition node should be pointless as we can just care about playing the desired animation and specify the blend time, because the blending would happen taking the current animation

Yes, this is a good idea. The reason I say we need a transition node is to primarily reduce the number of nodes used in each of this animation node trees.

Consider this. We have a walk-run blending on one side. On the other side, we have a walk-crouch blending. And both of these must be then blended with a weapon holding animation, which would be same for both walk-run and walk-crouch.

This can be realized like so:

@knowledgenude

i will not drawn anymore because you had see how is my skill for it

Looks good enough for me

Finally, the objective here is we have 3 nodes: Get Action, Blend, and Transition. These nodes can be used in any order and in any number. In the end, we get only one animation to be played.

Say we have a function for each of these nodes like so,

 1. getAction(action: String): Action
 2. blend(Action1: Action, Action2: Action, Factor: Float, mask: Int): Action
 3. transition(Action1: Action, Action2: Action, transitionTime: Float): Action

Is what I just stated realizable? If not, what arguments should we change so that we could realize such a system?

Please share your thoughts.