Friday Update 10/11/2019 (Patreon)

This week I started to learn how to use a powerful new tool for animation in the latest version of Blender. Native in Blender 2.8 is the ability to blend different animations together to create one final animation. This is basically a big part of the toolset I had been trying to add to Unity that would allow me to use small modular animations to create variance in animations without substantially increasing the workload.

Before-hand my work flow was to create one big loop for slow actions like breathing, slight position changes, etc. and then create a smaller loop for rapidly repeated actions like thrusting. Then I would duplicate the smaller loop to fill the bigger loop to get the final animation. The problem with this approach is that I would need to tweak each of the copies of the small loop if I needed to make a change to the big loop.

The new way of doing things allows me to define these animations as separate entities. I can define a "blink" animation, a "breathing" animation, "thrusting/receiving" animation etc. and have them overlaid and repeated on top of the "big loop" which will control things like limb/torso/head/eye positions. Moreover, I can reuse these animation when animating the same sex bot at a later date. This makes it more economical to create a facial animation for each voice sound clip.

I've added the second to last stage to the Foxy Maledom game over using these new techniques. There are a couple visible examples in this animation for the benefits of the new workflow: I only had to animate the player's stroke once, then I just repeated that action and "scaled" it down/up to increase/decrease speed. Foxy's facial animations are all overlaid so that they can be reused, I may go back and add them to previous stages to demonstrate this. Those facial animations were also synced to audio files that I'm working on, even if they don't make it into the game I can quickly tweak the animations to scale with whatever audio file I add.

The bad part about this approach is that the animations will be baked instead of procedural. There won't be an ability to randomize the animation during game play, however I can increase the duration and repeat actions to "bake in" some pseudo-randomness similar to all of the other animations but much much more efficient.