It's Alive

Animation in Pod & Rodney is handled through a series of FBX exports. A single FBX file will hold all the animations for any individual game asset. Specific animations are stored in the FBX as a series of frames that the engine will call on when needed. This keeps our filing system simple and minimizes the number of notes we have to take in order to keep things organized.

Here is a sample of what our frame data chart looks like for a few of our animated assets:

door_type0
1 - 30: idle closed
31 - 45: open
61 - 90: idle open
91 - 115: close

lever_type0
1 - 30: idle
31 - 65: switching

teleport
1 - 30: idle

rodney
1 - 30: idle static
31 - 60: idle 0
61 - 120: idle 1
121 - 150: idle 2
151 - 169: walk cycle

etc etc.

And here is a rough render of frames 151-169 from Rodney's FBX file:


This single file / frame catalog is among the many steps we've taken to optimize our communication pipeline between developing visual assets and implementing them into the engine. By doing this we've managed to avoid a lot of potential headaches.