Parts-based Animation System

Monsters can reach out and bite you now!
Animated robot army

Inspiration

I wanted to see more characters moving around in Horizon Worlds, and I thought I could make this easier for folks if they were able to animate their characters within Blender.

What it does

This is a full workflow + tooling for animating characters or even vehicles within Horizon Worlds. The asset itself is the TypeScript "framework" which ships in a single script. It comes with a couple example characters that show what the system is capable of.

How we built it

I developed the TypeScript and the Blender extension in Python through lots of trial and error! I made the example characters with free assets via the process that I show in the tutorial series.

Challenges we ran into

Dealing with axis transposition can make your head hurt.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The animation system is currently employed within the popular world Guns & Monsters Remake. I worked with xx_dropshot_xx to add hands for his monster head enemies and then added walk / death / attack animations with no performance degradation. Go check it out!!

What we learned

A ton about animation in general. My first stab at implementing a "frame-finding" algorithm was really choppy. Binary search for the win! There's probably a better way to do it but it seems performant enough.

What's next for Parts-based Animation System

Hopefully helping out more folks implement it against their worlds. I've had several people reach out and show me what they're doing with it and it's a great feeling. I've had a few feature requests so I'll be tackling those soon, and adding more tutorials.