Multiple Animation files, one model

Questions
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1

Hi,

I am currently working with a project where I am loading meshes with animations in glTF format. This works fine - as it imports the animations correctly. But requirements have changed, and I realise it might be better to keep the skeleton/animations separate from the models.

Any ideas on how would I go about loading the animations and applying them to the mesh?

Regards,

F

2

Can you say more about the requirements, and your authoring workflow?

This isn’t easy to do, see [Solved] Question about exporting skin Weights/Indices with Blender glTF-exporter for some discussion and ideas. Are you mainly concerned about downloading large amounts of data upfront? And are the number of animations such that you could export them all into one file (for later splitting/processing), or too much for even that? Or do you need to let artists create animations for the same characters while working in parallel on different files?

3

Thanks for the reply - The main issue is that the game will require a large number of variations in mesh detail, but use the same animations. For instance, think of a situation in which the same cutscene could play multiple times, but the player has a choice about which character appears in the scene.

I’m still developing a workflow with the art team - but we will have a large number of cutscenes (these will eventually become parts of a QTE system). There will be a couple of dozen scenarios that have to play out. In each of these scenarios, the ‘actors’ will be replaced with the players chosen avatar. Some of the requirements are:

  1. Working in MayaLT
  2. Exporting to FBX
  3. Converting from FBX to glTF via FBX2glTF
  4. Must support morph targets (this is one of the mechanisms to provide character variation)

My main concern is total size of the files (we would obviously pay AWS fees for the accumalated extra size). There may be upwards of 30 variations of the main character (same skeleton), and anyone of those characters could appear in the cutscene. And each character may have to appear in upwards of 50 cutscenes. So clearly it would be ideal to separate the two.

I had noticed that I can load a glTF file which contains only animations, and the animation property is present - so presumbly I could strip these out, and apply this to a target mesh/skeleton at run time?

Regards,

F

4

Hi! I Have exactly the same issue, lets say a have character with 30 animations, in order to add one more a have to re export all the data every time, it takes hours, and during export there is a possibility to spoil previos work.