Multi-character animations

[slapin]

@Mike3D @reattiva

I need a suggestion of effective workflow for the following scenario:

In blender I have animation which have multiple character (say 2) doing some animation which involves animating all of them in sync (say finishing move, dancing, handshake). I need to reproduce this scene (this kind of scene, as I expect to have multiple of them) in Urho3D. Any ideas on steps which are needed to be done? I generally use layered animation for characters behavior, but I need a set of multicharacter animations for some of them, like character interactions, I think these are hard to do using procedural approach and would be better done in Blender directly.

The problem here is that while skeletal animations will be exported directly (would be great to avoid exporting actual geometry) the offsets will not be exported. Also even if export is somehow accomplished via FBX (for example), the setup will require recombining, which will heavily depend on actual scene, which means a lot of tweaking for each animation. Is there some way to reduce strain and hackery? Thanks!

[Mike3D]

I don't really understand your concept of 'multicharacter animations' and 'offsets'. Are they animations involving only a few select bones ?

[slapin]

My animation involves whole scene at worse case. Most common case is 2-3 character actions

On Sat, Jul 1, 2017 at 12:42 PM, Mike3D notifications@github.com wrote:

I don't really understand your concept of 'multicharacter animations' and 'offsets'. Are they animations involving only a few select bones ?

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[reattiva]

You should be able to export offset as the position of the root bone with respect to the origin. So the easier way is to have 2 or more animations and synchronize them. If you want a single animation I think you need to modify the code to join 2 or more Animated Models and have a single skeleton.

[slapin]

I understand that I need 2 animations for 2 characters, but I need to create them in the same blender scene. The problem is that offsets will not be stored. How can I find some way to export offsets together with animations? Also offsets might be animated too... So export for value animation is also needed. So I wonder how can I do this...

On Sun, Jul 2, 2017 at 3:32 PM, reattiva notifications@github.com wrote:

You should be able to export offset as the position of the root bone with respect to the origin. So the easier way is to have 2 or more animations and synchronize them. If you want a single animation I think you need to modify the code to join 2 or more Animated Models and have a single skeleton.

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[reattiva]

What do you mean by offsets?

[slapin]

Well, we have skeletal animation + character offset + rotation which define character composition on scene.

On Tue, Jul 4, 2017 at 9:06 PM, reattiva notifications@github.com wrote:

What do you mean by offsets?

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[Mike3D]

If I now understand correctly, what you are after is 'Node Animation', as documented here: 'https://urho3d.github.io/documentation/HEAD/_skeletal_animation.html and discussed here: https://discourse.urho3d.io/t/solved-export-animated-node-transforms-to-urho3d/1067 I successfully integrated this feature in the exporter a couple of years ago, but never finished it (didn't implemented scaling and the 6 orientations).