Just came across this talk from David Rosen of Wolfire Games (OverGrowth) that he gave at this years GDC and found it really fascinating. Its about procedural character animation and the little tricks and process he used to get a really responsive (to game input) character with great looking animation using only 13 keyframes in total for everything!
Its well worth watching (only 25 mins long) just to get some ideas with how far procedural algorithms can enhance animations. In fact its so interesting i’m going to watch it a second time.
Though to be fair they do disclaim it as The coding style is what you might expect from a self-taught high school student, so it could be a challenge to understand
But man, that code has many hard-coded values. I assume their current code looks very different. A wonder they finished that game. Would not have thought that.
How did he solve the problem at the start? About Marios responsiveness compared to Prince of Persia? I didn’t see anything that would fix that, the lack of keyframes doesn’t magically fix that…
Saw this video, its a really cool idea and the results look great.
How would somebody start with keyframe interpolation in Unity? Is there an easy way to hook in Mecanim or the legacy anim system to give some kind of baseline understanding of the rig? I really haven’t done much with animations yet, but in the most naive way it would come down to moving each bone object manually. Could you just loop through from the root on down and use transform.localPosition to move from one keyframe position to a target position for each bone?
