i have a few questions about animations...sort of 'rules' for what to do when making these.

1. The equip animation. At what position should it begin and end?
2. What are the must have attack animations? Im guessing some hand to hand animations are required, but if say i want to use a one hadned weapon on the creature, what ones do they need?
3. With creatures, does the equip animation ever play? When Ive seen skeletons even out of combat they hold their weapon the idle pose.

thanks

Begin at WalkIdle and End at WeaponIdle.



None are required for a creature to work.



The only anims required to get combat working are Equip, Unequip and one attack (any Attack).



The Equip does play if the animations are not messed up which oddly some of Beth's are read all of the problems people have with the Goblin some of its Equip and Unequip anims are messed up, a few of the other creatures exhibit the same issues, I can only imagine it was done on purpose to the creatures as beth did not want the creatures to have a sheathing position for held weapons so the purposesly messed up the Equip's and Unequip's so that they would work on load but not during runtime.

Adding a SideWeapon/BackWeapon nodes may also help with getting them to not have their weapons already equipped.

EDIT:

I did some real quick tests

And the Presence of a SideWeapon or BackWeapon node determines if the creature gets the weapon auto equipped onto the weapon node or not.

And the animations determine if they are able to Equip/Unequip the weapon or not which if they are missing those two nodes seems to not be allowed.

so

Just adding those two nodes will let creatures have a sheathing position for their weapon the problem being that Beth did not animate the Equip/Unequip anims for these creatures in a manner that would work well with having sheathing positions.

Thanks for the info SaidenStorm, can always rely on you answering my animation questions