I watched a CGI video today, which shown a glimpse of how the author animated their character. It wasn’t in Blender, and one of the things I saw was a very useful feature. I’m not sure if Blender has it, and I’d like to know if there’s any way to achieve the same here.
I’ll start with the standard way of animating moving characters in Blender, which is how I (and IIRC most people) do it: You create a walk animation for the armature, copy-pasting keyframes to repeat it over the duration of the walk. Then you key in the position and rotation the character starts from, the ones it ends at, as well as intermediate ones along the way. If you’re lucky, animation matches the walk speed and the feet never slide off the ground.
Now this is what I seen, which I think is a dozen times better: The author only had to key the positions of the character, that’s it. Leg animation as well as the character’s rotation were automatically handled. At first I was confused, but easily understood how this must be: The armature has a walk animation, but it’s automatically mapped based on the character’s velocity. So no matter how fast or slow it walks at any moment, the legs will always move correctly, making sure the character never slides. Rotation is pretty obvious… you just make the character face the way it’s going.
How can we have the same in Blender? Is there a way to make an armature action automatically loop, animation speed based on how fast the character is moving at each moment? As an even better addition, can you pin different armature actions to different speed ranges and have them blend (so walk and run animations automatically come in place where needed)? Further more, what if we could assign armature actions based on acceleration and deceleration too? That way we could also automate the character pushing forward to gain speed, or backward to brake while trying to stop after running. Obviously, such actions should only act as modifiers, so other movement can still be animated on the timeline as usual.
If the feature exists, shame on me for not knowing. If not, it would be fantastic and I really hope the Blender team can consider it! An artist can leave permanent walk / run / accelerate / decelerate animations in their model, and when they make an animated film they only have to keyframe specific movements, without needing to touch the walk cycle and waste time adapting it again.