Procedural Animation

Question

Can anyone help me get started with procedural animation in Godot? Seems like the way to do animation if you're an indie. If you haven't seen David Rosen's GDC talk about procedural animation, I highly recommend it.

Does anyone have an example project or just a few pointers on where to start? I already have a few frames keyed in Blender and imported into Godot.

Comments

David Rosen doesn't have a leg to stand on talking about productivity for small teams; Overgrowth has been in development for what, 10 years?

Nonetheless an interesting talk.

Answer 1

Hi!

Godot has a special class for procedural animation called "Tween".

You can find it in the docs here:
http://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/classes/class_tween.html

Answer 2

Tweens are mostly useful if you want to create simple code-driven animations for which you don't know parameters in advance.

If animations are more complex, you can still use AnimationPlayer, but with a small trick: before playing an animation, find keyframes you want to change parameters, then play the animation.

What's with "the way to do it if you are indie"?

(sorry I couldn't see the video, my HTML5 browser doesn't have Flash)

Comments

The video presents it as a way to minimize the amount of animation you have to create by hand. Which is ideal if you're one person making a game.

Answer 3

You can also try AnimationTreePlayer. It's kind of a mess, but it more or less works and it's meant for this sort of thing. It lets you blend between multiple animations (which could just be poses).

Answer 4

For character animations it's important to learn Inverse kinematics specially in Godot because it has no native implementation of it, your gonna have to write it yourself, the good thing is that it's an well know implementation that you can find in the internet, also it seems that Godot 4 will have it ready to go in 3D, for death animations you can use ragdolls, but if you want something more elaborate like active ragdolls, Godot currently does not support it, so there is no easy way to mix animations and physics based interactions.

Comments

This post 6 years old, from 2016!

Create new one instead of summon post from that far past.
It's not even relevant anymore.