I wonder how skeletal animations in games work. I am writing my own graphics engine for fun, and I have come across several problems with animations.  Here is how I do it right now:   Load the mesh with animations Simulate every animation with the CPU and then send it to my GPU via a texture that I make from the final transformation matrices. In my shader I multiply every vertex by the transformation matrices that are tied to that vertex.   This method works very good (until now). Now to the problem, if I have two animations that I want to use at the same time (running and shooting for example) then I have to do a "height check". It still works but I am getting serious doubts about it. If I want to render custom directions with this shoot animation (to where the camera is heading) I just don't know how I could fix this with my current method.  How can I accomplish this?
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Say I have a framework with characters that can run and walk and of course, stand still.  Am I right in thinking that animation blending is the process of smoothly transitioning between these by generating dynamic animations at runtime?  If so, what is the basic theory of how this works, and how would I implement it?
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For example, I'm looking to animate at 60 frames per second, but clearly my artist isn't going to hand-author 60 frames of art for every second of an animation clip and even if he could, it would only work properly in locked-timestep.  So given two successive frames in a sprite-based animation, I want to smoothly "interpolate" or "morph" between them at runtime to produce a smoother, and higher frame rate animation based on where the update time for the current frame lies between the two frames.  Another way to look at it would be to say that my animation is authored such that the frames occur at regular intervals, much less frequent then 60 FPS. Say I'm 30% between when frame N should appear and when frame N+1 should appear. I want to render an image that looks like it's a 30% the way through a smooth transition from the frame N image and the frame N+1 image.  , but am interested in other potential solutions I could look at for implementing this. Please do not recommend a tool as a solution.
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I have a skeleton rig and mesh configured in blender that I have imported from 3rd party application.  The rig and mesh are already working together correctly in blender.  I would like to adjust the position of some of the bones to align with animations from another 3rd party application.   Currently 1 or 2 bones cause the mesh to deform incorrectly due to differences in bone position between the animations and the armature for my skeletal mesh.  So the question, is it possible to move the position of the bone without the attached mesh being deformed during the move and maintain the existing weight painting for the new bone position?  So for example in my rig the neck bone is positioned more towards the back of the neck surface, but the neck bone in the animation is more centered, so when I apply the animation the head of my mesh is artificially leaning forward due to relocation of neck bone.  When I try to move any bone in my rig the attached mesh moves with it  Hopefully the makes some form of sense :oo  Thanks in advance
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Do you know I can do something like this?  How to animate text over a twisted mesh, or Text flowing along an infinity loop      I get that there is a shape (cube / rectangle / cylinder being extruded, made into the shoe, but, how am I best doing a texture, and then make it loop etc.
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I have a problem. I am going to make a minecraft animation in blender. But when I put a minecraft texture on a 3d cube that is 16x16x16 it is very low resolution is there a way to get the texture in a better resolution or is there a way to make blender make the texture better?  I hope you have an answer. Thanks in advance
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I am working on a game where I want to allow users to mix multiple colors (similar to shown in this video): . I have the following questions:  I am expecting that this is done using shaders. What kind of shader I have to use for such implementation? What will be the logic to create this type of shader? Are there any other ways using which this feature can be implemented? Are there any open source tutorials or examples?  I would appreciate any suggestions and thoughts on this topic. Thank you.
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I'm currently working on a project with Unity 3D, and my plan is to design everything with Blender. But I didn't know until today that Cycles renderer is meant for animations and HD images.  Can I use Cycles for a game in Unity as well?  I've heard about baking, but I don't know how it works, other than creating a UV image with light impact to the mesh of an object. But would this mean that moving an object around the scene will make it look like the light is till glued to the object?  This doesn't sound that good if objects in a game are supposed to move around.
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Blender worked fine before I installed a GPU to my PC. Is it the GPU? How can I fix this? I already reinstalled to the latest version. When I try to move a cube, the orange outline only moves but not the cube and I cant click it.
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I am doing an animation with a camera to add 3D elements to it (don't really know what it is called) when I press shift z to render my scene, things look great.  but when I try to actually render an image from my animation it only shows the monkey with the shadow, but no background.  I know that it has something to do with compositing nodes and stuff, but I am not sure how to works.. could someone please help? A also I used the new shadow catcher thing to make the shadow appear. Thank you.
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Helllo!  For a project that I am doing, I need to render the my model to a sprite sheet. This is all fine, except that the model has a cloak, which uses a cloth animation. I need to smoothly transition from the end of the cloth simulation to the start, so it doesn't just jerk back, but I can't find any way of doing this.  Thanks in advance.
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I created a model with make human and added hair via the emitter tool.  I added clothes and rigged the person with pitchipoy.  Everything seems to be moving right except for the hair.  While animating the object the hair stays in place, shouldn't it follow the emitter and the bones?  Or do I have to add bones for the hair somehow as well?
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So I'm writing an animation import script... since animation bone names can differ from the armature's bones in question, I want to create the actions and edit their group names manually, and then manually assign them to the armature.  The problem I'm having is I can create an unrelated action with unrelated groups, but the channels of those groups seem to require linked pose bones...  Since it's safe to say these pose bones don't exist, how can I assign keyframes to raw data?
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I have a pre-rendered animation that I want to play on a TV model in my new scene animation, and I really don't know how.   Would I do it within Blender, or should I make the material on the TV screen green, so I can green-screen it on?
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Basically what I want to do is scale a skeleton down. The reason for this is that I'm ripping a model from another game and I want to use it in Unity. When the model is ripped from the other game, it is way too big for unity and has to be scaled down in order for it to even show up on the screen.  This is my model. It has a walking animation.    Now I want to scale the model down from it's original scale to 0.2 by 0.2 by 0.2, I scale the skeleton down so that the mesh goes with it.   Now I'll have to apply the scaling, so that it's the smaller scale is the default one, instead of the big one.   As soon as I apply it, the model moves away from it's original location, and the animation is all messed up, it goes much faster to it's walking destination because he's smaller.  How do I avoid the skeleton, and most importantly, the animation from messing all up?
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I'm designing a character with different animations (idle, eating, walking, etc) that are separated in different blender actions in the same .blend file.  I would like to queue the actions to be rendered, so I could leave the computer rendering over night. Is there any way to do that??
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how do you make clothes move along with your model? Do you rig the model first and then parent it to the body of the character then click cloth simulation? I am a little bit confused with the process. Thanks for the help.
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It's possible to animate a change noise texture by animating the texture coordinates with a mapping node or by animating the texture space, however this only works on one axis at a time (on the other axes the texture will appear to be sliding across the object's surface).  For example, the top face has the desired effect but the other faces appear to be moving/sliding upwards:    Even with all three axes location and rotation animated it still appears to be sliding rather than statically changing.    Is there some way to make each face appear like the top face in the first gif but still be seamlessly blended with the other faces? This should work for other shapes as well.  In other words, I'm looking for a way to animate the "seed" of the texture.