#TIL you can align post previews in Instagram (hold post > options)

Animations in Godot: late evening findings I

Given a model skeleton (e.g. arms + body + legs) and some animations for it, we can setup a simple Start → Idle pipeline so that model goes into Idle animation on start.

For movement animation, we need to blend 4-5 animations into one based on character's direction and speed, and there is a BlendSpace2D node that does exactly this: given calculated blend position it's mapped onto a 2D space with sideways animation on the negative/positive X, forward at the negative Y and backwards at the positive Y, blending those into a final one based on the input.

Now, with

Start → IW

and

         Backwards
            ︲
Sideways ‒ Idle ‒ Sideways
            ︲
          Forward

we will have a smooth movement animation by providing a point on this chart which will represent character's movement state

Animations in Godot: late evening findings III

To solve this, there is a BlendTree node that provides a way to build more complex pipelines. Moving BlendSpace2D into BlendTree as Locomotion start node and connecting it to tree's output will result in same behavior space had; then we can use a OneShot node which takes two sources (in and shot), optional skeleton filters (e.g. arms only) and, when fired, overwrites filtered skeleton parts of in with shot.

I.e. by putting Locomotion and Cheer animation into OneShot

Locomotion → Cheer_OS → output
                ^
             Cheer_A

we can have a nicely slapped Cheering animation on top of smooth movement 💃

To add more one-shot animations we can basically chain OneShot nodes since they return untouched in animation when not fired, i.e. only fired node of chain will be played

P.S. I wrote a ton about animations in private chats so decided to drop it here, 👎 if I should stop doing this since I will have a lot to post while replicating the SneakOut