You can use skinned animation when designing models in Castle Game Engine. This means that your 3D model defines a number of joints (aka "bones") that can be transformed (e.g. to make a "walk" animation) and cause a mesh (aka "skin") to animate accordingly, following the joints.
In most cases, you don’t need to do anything special on the engine side to use it. Simply design your models in a 3D authoring tool with skinned animation, export them to glTF or X3D formats, and load them in Castle Game Engine as usual. The following approaches work smoothly:
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Design models using Blender with Blender’s armature and bones. Export it to glTF (option available out-of-the-box in Blender) which will load in our engine.
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Design models using Maya and export using Rawkee X3D export plugin. Export to X3D with a Skin node.
We try to perform the animation on the GPU, which means it’s very fast. To demonstrate this, our examples/animations/animate_bones_by_code demo has a button "Add Crowd". We also have a fallback (for ancient GPUs) implementation that animates on the CPU.