The anim cheat that's hard to beat 700+ chars on-screen, animated.

It is a neat illusion, but it only works for characters with 1-2 animations (unless you are dedicated). If you need to show lots of troops, or have a strategy game, this can be useful for having a bunch of characters. Using object colours, you can make characters appear different.

Basically, I used 2-3 meshes already posed, then I swapped through them real quick, calling them falsetto anims.
(like rubbing two pennies together, or a 3d flipbook)

How I did it.

Example File.

Because armature animations have to calculate the vertices, they tend to slow the game engine when you have too many, but swapping the mesh doesn’t take much power. Thus you can swap different poses to fake an animation. You do have to make a few pose objects (2-4), but that is easy, and you can frighten the player with a large army (I may use this for the mooks in my projects, imagine 500 wolves bearing down on you).

Hope you guys enjoy and can use it. (Yes, I tried it with physics enabled, without any difference in framerate)

There is also procedural animations,

if keypress w---------------and---------------walk=1
if walk=0--------------------/

if walk min:1 max:59-----------and----------walk add 1

if walk=60-----------------and------------walk=0

(“controller”)

limb

always -------------copy--------------walk

if walk min:1 max:15------and--------------motion 1
if walk min:15 max:45------and--------------motion 2
if walk min:45 max:60------and--------------motion 1

This is extremely interesting.I guess they could walk on ground with hills couldn’t they.

here a more complex but functional version of this

Also, one thing to note about animations, I think you can bake a animated mesh ?

ditch the armature?

Attachments

TheMethod.blend (708 KB)

3d, you should be able to have them on hills, haven’t tried that yet.

BPR: Your method is a bit complex, using seperate objects don’t look as good (but it is impressive). I had forgotten that you can bake anims, I’ll try that (and see if I can do a variation of your method). Thanks for the inspiration.

On aside, I looked up procedural animations, the material version doesn’t seem to work in the game engine, and the armature version may be too complex to implement, sometimes you have to keep things simple.