Blending animations

[imyourm8]

Is it possible in Spriter to blend animations? Say i need to implement animation from Run mode to Idle mode. This is true that arms and legs can stop in any position and they must to return to idle state. Have i wait for procedural animations?

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

Spriter doesn't support this directly yet, but certianly will in the future.

However, any Sriter plug-in can be made to so so even now... you'd just have to make sure all animations you want to blend use the same exact set-up (bones for the same limbs, to the same scales, with the same names etc). The easy way to insure this is to always create one animation based on a key frame from the other.

Then its simply a matter of having the Spriter plig-in tween from the last keyframe of animation to the first key-frame of the second animation.

I think someone has already done this for at least one of the Spriter plug-ins in the works...but I don't remember for which authoring system.

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

[Trixt0r]

Yes, I already implemented such a feature in the Generic Java Plugin (which is not perfect yet -.-).

I don't think Spriter needs this feature because if you create extra animations for the tweening between two animations, you spend more space (yes some bytes, haha) on the hdd and you will need to code more since you need to distinguish between the last and the new animation.

If your plugin has this feature already you don't have to care about such problems. You only need to change the animations by the object's state and say on which speed you want to tween the animations. The rest should be taken by the plugin. And the calculation effort should be the same as on a normal animation since the plugin should calculate the transformation between two keyframes.

A problem, which Spriter and the plugins can't bypass, is that, as Mike already mentioned, the order of your objects. So every animation needs the same bone/object structure otherwise you will get very weird animation tweenings.

[GGMich]

I'm glad I found this thread. I also apologize for resurrecting it after a lengthy quiet period. My team is currently working on an official Spriter runtime for Torque 2D. We just had a review of the source we have generated so far, and the topic of blending came up. With the acknowledgement that blending in Spriter itself is planned, or at least desired, we are hesitant to add our own implementation.

We came to the same conclusion that to support blending in our runtime, we would be dependent on the Spriter animation to share all the same bones and references. While this would work, I believe it will be flimsy. Not knowing how the format of the data might change, our implementation might have to be tossed completely to support what the Spriter team comes up with.

Any way, I just wanted to jump in and say we (the T2D user/developers) would love to have blending. We will not take a leap of faith on our implementation until it's officially supported in Spriter. We are going to structure the Spriter animations in Torque 2D in such a way that it will be possible to support blending in the future, but we'll have to follow the topic closely as Spriter matures to see if changes need to be made on the fly.

[lucid]

Animation blending will go hand in hand with some other advanced features that we're not ready to announce yet. Once we iron out these bugs, it should be a relatively short road to 1.0, and then we'll immediately get started on those unannounced features we keep mentioning. Personally, this 1.x stuff is what I've been most anxious to get to since day 1.