At the moment i am importing some characters with animations. They are for now all animated and modeled in Lightwave and are using bones.
These bone animations work well for the first person view weapons.(you can see some in video from previous entry).
But they are 'only' played the way they are animated in lightwave.



Character animation should be interpolated. For example from walk to run or run with reload. So no connecting animations are needed to do these little transitions from one anim type to another.
We have 4 different basic type of weapons. Knife/grenades, rifle, one handed weapons, dual handed weapons(2 magnum or 2 ingram [grin])

For each basic type we made run, walk, crawl and duck moving types. If character will run or walk and should reload. The legs will be locked in the moving mode(walk/run) and only the bones from upper body will play the reload animation. Overall 70 anims have to be inserted and combined [crying] I hate these neverending lists.

Weapons and armor are placed on chracters with 'NULL'-replacers on bones. There the weapons, armor or other addons will be placed.
The crosses on hip and hands show where these replacers are:


And finally some models from sketch to model which will hopefully move in engine next week [smile]