Even more animation frustration

Planning and Development

I’m at the point where I need a reliable method to import animated assets into Lyridia.  I’ve been back and forth with several different options from the THREE.js native JSON format, to .fbx files, to glTF files.  I currently don’t like any of them, but it seems like glTF will have the best standardization and support going forward, so that’s what I’d really like to use.  I’ve been using .fbx files but I’ve noticed that the animations I’m creating just don’t look right.  It’s like what is shown in the game is a watered down version of what I see in Blender.  I realize that makes no sense, but that’s what I’m consistently seeing.  As a test I made an animation where the player’s leg raises up to the side at a 90 degree angle.  In Blender it comes right up to 90 degrees then drops back down.  When I export the animation to a .fbx file and play that same animation using THREE.js, the characters leg only goes up about 60-70 degrees.  That makes absolutely no sense to me, but I can see it with my eyes.  Fortunately the glTF exports seem to be better, but importing .glb files into THREE.js is a process on its own and has the whole game broken at the moment.

As much as I was looking forward to putting out a release in the next day or so, I feel like I just have to spend the time to figure this out now.  So I’m going to take at least a few days and set up a .glb importing test environment so that I can figure out exactly how to export the animations from Blender and import them into THREE.js.  The joys of using rapidly evolving open source tools.

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