Animation System

Anmation System

A part of a university module on game engine animaiton systems. My goal with this software was to create a system with the best possible API and with minimum depencance on platform being used, so that the module could be easily inserted into any project.

What was created was a pretty powerful 2D sprite & skeletal, and 3D blend-node based skeletal animation system, with suport for IK as well as a methods for loading in the animation data.

The system was created to be used with a propriety C++ engine, which is what is running the demonstration gifs, but care was taken to minimise dependancy on this framework.

Animation system demonstrated with a walk/run cycle and movement-speed combined blend. Also shown with Inverse Kinematics on the hand.

There were two areas of intrest for me in this project. The first being

AnimationSystem::PureResult AnimatedMeshApp::LoadMeshAndAnimation()
{
   // create an animated object, returns Value/Error discriminated union
   auto createPlayerResult = animation_system_->CreateAnimatedObject("Player", 
                                                                     "xbot/xbot.scn") ;

   // early return the error if there is one 
   if(createPlayerResult.IsError())
      return createPlayerResult.ToPureResult();


   // move player from result to member variable
   player_ = createPlayerResult.Take();


   // load the animations, configure with delegates, return early in the case of error
   if(auto animationResult =
      animation_system_->CreateAnimationFor(*player_,
                                          "Walk","xbot/xbot@walking_inplace.scn","",
                                          [](IAnimatorConfig& animPlayer)
                                          {
                                             animPlayer.SetAnimationTime(0);
                                             animPlayer.SetLooping(true);
                                          });
      animationResult.IsError())
   {
      return animationResult;
   }

   if(auto animationResult =
      animation_system_->CreateAnimationFor(*player_,
                                             "Run","xbot/xbot@running_inplace.scn","",
                                             [](IAnimatorConfig& animPlayer)
                                             {
                                                animPlayer.SetAnimationTime(0);
                                                animPlayer.SetLooping(true);
                                             });
      animationResult.IsError())
   {
      return animationResult;
   }


   // set the player's animation state
   if(auto result = player_->Animator().SetAnimation("Walk"); result.IsError())
      return result;


   // return OK
   return AnimationSystem::PureResult::OK();
}

Snippet showing the API for creating animation objects.