I have now managed to get a very simple implementation of blending two animations together. I created a snowman in 3DS Max and applied two animations to it, a slide forward (since snowmen can't walk) and a jump. This didn't take long at all to get a simple version working but it is lacking a lot in design which is my next major step. 

Unfortunately my artistic skills are pretty poor and I have been trying with no avail for a while to create a simple character with walk and run animations. This would allow me to properly test the blending, introducing fade in/out values and blend points. 

As the art has been taking me so long and I needed a break I decided to tackle some low hanging fruit( Double Buffering ). This was already partially implemented but could really do with some wrapping up in preparation for the next task after animation( GUI/Fonts ). I have now created a double buffer object that has two framebuffers and that object deals with switching between the two buffers and allows you to get at the Texture associated with them. Once the double buffering has finished rendering it is finally rendered to the default buffer to present to the screen.

Using this I have laid the foundations of some core GUI classes, the first being a GUI Layover, which is basically just a full screen texture like a HUD. User Interface design is such a large part of a game that I will be approaching this with a lot of care to try and create a flexible design that will easily allow me to create, draw and interact with the GUI components. Anyway I have been babbling on for too long here is the video: 

The video has two layovers active, the writing and the boxes on the top and bottom and also a blue gradient from the sides. This gradient effect is similar to how some games visualise damage being taken but is normally a red gradient. 

Next few things are getting my artistic finger out and produce a model I can actually test some of this blending with properly. Could also potentially add sound into the engine as that is low hanging fruit as well.

Much more to come, hoping to get some done over the holidays in between the alcohol and merriment but it is unlikely.

Merry Christmas :)

Since finishing the first working version of the animation I started testing out different file types and cleaning up a lot of my code. Since then I have been attempting to implement multiple animations and animation blending.

First off I have created an "AnimationTrack" class which hold all the keyframe data for one animation regarding one bone. That is slightly confusing to say, basically the bones no longer hold the keyframes for an animation, instead they have a number of tracks which hold the keyframe data for each specific animation. This way multiple animations can be realted to one bone hierarchy. 

Second of all I needed some way of importing multiple types of animation, which wasn't so easy. Assimp supports multiple animations and with the right files it is fairly straightforward. The problem is that I am using 3DS Max and ideally collada files for all my models and the combination of the two has been a pain. Apparently 3DS Maxx doesn't allow you to easily export multiple animations in one collada file(Why?? I have no idea!!). This meant I would either have to use a different file type such as ".x" or find some way to get around this issue. After some searching I found that there are ways in which people have had to get round this before, specifically for importing into the Unity Engine.

The way in which unity deals with this is to have all animations represented on a single timeline in 3DS Max and then using the Start and End KeyFrames breaks the animations up when loading. Personally I don't like this as it means you can't just load a file and it will all work perfectly. 

The approach I thought of was to have seperate collada files all with the same bind pose model but with different animations inside. This way when the file is loaded it will check to see if the model already exists and if it does just check to see if there is a new animation and just load that. That way all you ever have to do is load as many or as little files as you need, i.e. the animations you will need and you aren't altering one file all the time to change one animation. This approach has caused more trouble than I thought, mostly due to 3DS Max once again. Max was naming all the animations the same when being exported and also often didn't supply a name for the RootNode of the scene, which was what I was using to check the model was the same.

Ideally I would want my approach to work but I decided I had spent too much time on it and instead implemented the "All in one timeline" approach. I have now got this working and although I do have to provide extra input it works fairly well. There is more than likely going to be extra input for things like bone masking and specifying blend points so It doesn't seem too bad, also it seems to be the standard way that artists do it so that is always a benefit.

I have got the animations loaded in this manner now, although there isn't much to show. I should shortly have a demo of multiway blended animations.

Keep Coding :)