Hey folks. I thought you might know the answer to this probably simple question: I've tallied almost 200 character animations that I'd like to put in for my project (reality willing, that is). However, some of this may be double counted as I have listed similar actions in different positions. For example, there is an action of typing in the air at a virtual console / hologram, which I see as the arms up and hands making short jabs at the air; this action can be performed sitting or standing, but I've listed it under both positions. How much skill does it take to separate upper and lower body actions? Is this relatively trivial, or am I right in counting them twice as work that needs to be done in two different cases?

It's not too hard. It's mainly a matter of removing animations for all but the the bones that you don't care about in the set. You can then blend those into any other animation sequence you want at runtime. If you're working from X files, it's as easy as removing the animation objects from the file.

I'm not sure on the programming perspective, but from an artist's perspective it depends on how the bone chain is set up. If the bone heirarchy starts at the center of weight (as it should) you will most likely have a bone branch that is parent to the upper body and a bone branch that is parent to the lower body.

I would assume that one could literally seperate all animations on that level, since the split in the hierarchy keeps the two animations wholly independent.