Hi I just finished building myself a basic humanoid model and I have made an armature that appears to be working properly, so now comes the animation. I made a somewhat decent run cycle, and then added a sword to the character's hand to make some attack actions. At this point I began to wonder about a few things: a) The running animation (for the arms at least) shouldn't be the same for running empty-handed and running with a great big two-handed sword b) It would seem to go against the idea of skeletal animation if I were to reanimate the run cycle of the entire skeleton for all the different kinds of weapons it could be holding. So what would be the proper way to do this? Should I animate the regular run cycle for the character not carrying anything (or at least, nothing of significant weight/size), and then animate the run cycle with just the upper body for carrying [whatever] which would "overwrite" the upper body animation of the regular run cycle? I had more questions to ask, but after typing this one I can't think of any others. Any answers for this would be greatly appreciated, as I'm sure I'll have more to ask later. Thanks

Some people might redo the entire animation, but you don't necessarily have to. Modify the empty-handed one to act correct with the sword, save it out. Somewhere in your art pipeline you can extract only those animation components that move differently--upper torso and up, or maybe just shoulder down to the hand, whatever is different. The runtime can priority-blend those pieces over the base run, though that's a little more involved as to the specifics. Overall it might not save you much, since you'll have to save the animation anyway.

Can't you just save animations seperately? For instance, only save the animation data for the upper body for each type (empty, one hand, 2hand, gun, bow, whatever) and one set for the lower body. Then you'd only have to blend the upper body anims, while the lower body anim won't be affected.

I've actually never done this before, but I was under the impression that I would export the armature, and it would contain all of the bone data as well as all of the actions. If it clears anything up, I'm modelling and animating in Blender, and was planning on using Cal3D, though I may en up going with ogre and some other format...

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Original post by Anonymous Poster You would want to have the animations as seperate data so that you wouldnt have to duplicate it (and as the animations get more numerous and have subtler movements, the total data ammount will go up significantly).

I'm not sure what you mean here. Have the animations seperate from the skeleton?

Generally the model and skeleton is saved in a file, and the animations are saved in a file (often both have the same extension). The first file doesn't not contain any keyframes, and without the first file, the second file doesn't really do anything. This way you can have 100 different first files, all using the same second file.

But this is a little irrelevant I think to your initial question. You could handle this a variety of ways, before or after the game engine. You can-
Animate walk cycle A and walk cycle B from scratch.
Animate walk cycle A, delete upper body keyframes, reanimate the upper body, to create walk cycle B.
Create the lower body walk cycle, create the upper body cycleA, upper body cycle B, and mix/match/blend via the engine.
And so on and so on.
You could also do the arms individually instead of the entire upper body.