Change animation depending of distance

Questions & Answers
1

Lets put some examples to explain what I want. Suppose the player needs to take an object and you have the animation that is for take the object, but the problem would be that if you do the animation when you get close of the object, the hand doesn't goes to the object you will need to say the hand/arm to go specific to the object but doing the animation as you can see in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ueq8W1kkla4 at 6:18

Another example, is in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ueq8W1kkla4 at 7:20, as you can see it obviously use an animation, but there are places where the distance is between the 2 walls is different that means that the animation changes(change means that is not the same animation because you change the rotation of the legs), so my question is how I can do this kind of stuff.

Thanks :)

2

Well, your first example looks like a fix animation to me. Right before the "pick up" animation starts his position is "corrected" so animation fits the the object.

To calculate something like in your second example you would need some kind of an IK solver, but that's a quite heavy math problem. Maybe you can utilize the locomotion system. Rune Skovbo Johansen shoule be able to answer that question (since he developed it :D ). A lot AAA games have developed quite advanced animation systems. For example in Spore almost all animations are procedurally generated. They just uses some base movements but since you can "rig" your creature in game you can't use fix animations.