So I’m wondering what’s the proper way to blend upper and lower body animations. I’m making a simple top down shooter game, with an idle/walk/run locomotion system with strafing. That’s already 9 different animations for unarmed locomotion only, and without intermediate strafing such as walk 45° forward/right etc.
So for each weapon type that I want to have, I’d need a ton other animations, for exemple rifle idle, walk Fwd/bwd/L/R, run F/B/L/R, walk aiming F/B/L/R, etc.
And so the animation count would grow exponentially really fast, and as an indie dev I just can’t author or buy that many assets. I checked many tuts and project examples (motion matching is discarded since it requires even more anims), and I’m aware how per bone blending works, but idk, that just feels too artificial sometimes like, if I use the unarmed locomotion and just blend a rifle aiming pose, the lower body is doing its own thing and the upper body is sort of static, so when the character is walking, there’s no impact on the upper body.
Similarly that would apply to different characters. I just can’t have different sets of the exact same animations for telling apart male and female characters, or even add randomness.
So how do devs actually accomplish this with a limited set of animation assets? What would be a better way of blending animations (or something else) to make it look more natural and even add uniqueness?
Thanks.
Raf