Root motion for cut-scene style animations

Hello!

I have been searching around for whole 2 days now, and I cannot find a lot of info about root motion - I don’t even know if it would solve my problem…

I have two animations - one, where a non-playable character walks through a door, and two, where he picks up his keys from the floor.

I cannot seem to be able to blend between the two. The character, let’s call him John, he walks through the door, but the origin, or the root bone, stays behind the door (how it should be).
Then, the “picking up keys” animation is played, and John snaps back to the origin, behind the door.

How can I blend between the two animations, so he picks up the keys on the spot where the walking animation ended? Is that done through root motion?
I hope you guys understand.

Thanks,
Pav

I believe the best way to acheive this is to combine the “walk through the door” and “pick up keys” animations all as one animation exported from your 3D program and execute them with root motion so that the capsule follows the character into the room. The result will be at the end of the anim sequence the animation, root bone & capsule will be in the room and hence, will not snap back to the original position.

If you want it fully cut to where the character ends up back outside the room with the keys, you would do the same as above but include an animation of the character returning outside the door after he picks up the keys. Again, with root motion enabled so he is facing the right direct and in the proper position so he does not “snap back” to the original pose.

Thank you for the response.

For anyone else having a problem with getting the root motion working, the root bone has to be completely on top of the hierarchy (at least no other way worked). Also, the root bone has to be directly under the “Hips” bone (in the world), just moving in the XY, not the Z. Basically, cannot be moving upwards or downwards. Because I animated the character with the root bone fixed in the origin of the world, I had to redo this, easily by selecting “hips” and “root” and using the “Point Constraint” in Maya LT. This fixed the root bone under the hips bone. Attaching an image of the hierarchy.

Now I do have few questions on the workflow you have mentioned .


I have attached screens of the the animation. He starts on position 1 (which is drawn on the image, sorry for the quality), and finishes at position 2. Should I make the second animation (picking up the keys) on position 1 or 2?

If I enable the root motion now, the characters root just keeps still. Attaching a screen - the animation works but he doesn’t move. I have done a test before, with root motion enabled: the root moved, and when the walk loop finished and repeated, he just continued walking without snapping. He just walked to infinity. How do I enable the character’s root to be moving in-game? Or is it possible?

Thank you!
Pavel

Thanks for posting your resolution for others experiencing the same issue. As for preventing the animation from repeating infitinely, you will need to tell it when to stop in the event graph. In the following example, the character will continue to punch while the key is held down and will stop once the animsequence is finished. Note that it starts in the “closed” state and is only active when triggered by the user:

Thanks for this. But I am still hitting a problem - How can one animation add directly on another?
Let’s say that a character has walking loop, and that walking loop just adds on and adds on, so he goes to infinity?

I have mentioned this before, and it worked somehow, but now it doesn’t work anymore and that’s really strange. I have checked out some additive settings in the Animation tab…

Thanks. If it’s not understandable I can make some images.
Pavel