Animation Blending and Behavior

Animation_Blending

In this ICE tree, you can define all possible animations that an actor is capable of. This can be prerecorded animations or modified prerecorded animations. You can easily use the names for the states in the Animation State Selector node of the Behavior tree Therefore, this ICE tree acts as the place for defining the libraries of possible animations for an actor.

The most important things that you need to do in the Animation_Blending ICE tree are:

• Defining Animation States
  • You can use Animation States for referencing one or multiple Animation Sources
  • Animation State provides the possibility to assign a meaningful name for an animation. You can use this name later in the Behavior tree to use the animation.
  • Provides access to parameters, which define how an animation state is played back.
  • Provides possibilities to modify the action sources using constraints.
  • Provides solvers to handle locomotion animation so that an actor is properly blending between walking and running and that the playback speed of the animation is set accordingly to the speed of an actor.
• Defining Transitions between Animation States — Whenever a new Animation State is set to active, the transition defined here will be taken into account by the system.
• Animation Blending Core — A system to apply the animations and transitions.
  NoteThis system should be changed only by the expert users of crowd system.

Before using an animation state, you must define it in the Animation_ Blending tree.

Behavior

In this ICE tree, you can define when to use an appropriate animation state that was defined in the Animation_Blending tree. You can also trigger different animations according to the environment of the actor or just over time.

For more information about defining Animation States and defining the behavior of actors using the Animation_Blending and Behavior ICE trees, see How Action Sources Are Used in the Crowd Simulation.