Library crate:

Editor crate:

Bevy Animation Graph

Motivation

Animation graphs are an essential tool for managing the complexity present in the animation pipelines for modern 3D games. When your game has tens of animations with complex blends and transitions, or you want to generate your animations procedurally from very few keyframes, simple animation clip playback is not enough.

This crate works as an alternative to most of bevy_animation, and aims to provide a complete animation system and development workflow including animation graphs, animation state machines (i.e. animation controllers) and a graphical editor to create your animation graphs and state machines.

NOTE: This project is separate from the animation graphs introduced in bevy_animation in version 0.14.

Current Features

• Animation graphs are assets. They can be loaded from asset files, or created in code with an ergonomic API.
• Visual graph editor.
• Animation state machines:
  • Animation state machines are embedded as nodes in animation graphs.
  • Each state in a state machines plays back its own animation graph on demand.
  • Transitions also have their own animation graph, and they can query source and target states' animation graphs.
• Ragdoll support:
  • Visual ragdoll editing in the editor.
  • Support for partial ragdolls, where some bones are simulated and others kinematically driven by a target animation pose.
• Available nodes include:
  • Animation chaining (i.e. play one node after another).
  • Two-bone inverse kinematics.
  • Looping.
  • Linear Blending (in bone space).
  • 2D Blend space node.
  • Mirror animation about the YZ plane.
  • Animation clip playback.
  • Apply a given rotation to some bones in a pose using a bone mask.
  • Speed up or slow down animation playback.
  • Animation graph node.
  • Animation state machine node.
  • Arithmetic nodes: a variety of common operations on f32, Vec3, Quat, etc.
• Nesting animation graphs as nodes within other graphs.
• Animation synchronization using event tracks.
• Output from graph nodes is cached to avoid unnecessary computations.
• Support for custom nodes written in Rust.
  • Users can create their own editor binary by adding the editor plugin and registering their additional custom nodes in the Bevy type registry. The editor will automatically pick up all registered nodes.

Planned Features

1. Ragdoll "pose following" modes, where a simulated ragdoll bones try to match a target pose using physical forces:
   • Absolute matching mode, where the world space position/rotation of the target bone is tracked and use as an anchor for a spring force on the ragdoll bone.
   • Relative matching mode, where the ragdoll bone tries to match the target's position/rotation relative to its parent bone. We may need joint motors support on Avian to implement this mode properly.

Installation

This project is divided in two crates:

• bevy_animation_graph is the library part of this project. This should be added as a dependency to your project in order to use animation graphs. To install the latest published version from crates.io run

  cargo add bevy_animation_graph
  

  or manually add the latest version to your Cargo.toml.

  To install the latest git master, add the following to Cargo.toml

  # ...
  [dependencies]
  # ...
  bevy_animation_graph = { git = "https://github.com/mbrea-c/bevy_animation_graph.git" }
  # ...
  

• bevy_animation_graph_editor is the editor. You can install like you would install any other rust binary:

  # for the latest crates.io version
  cargo install bevy_animation_graph_editor
  # for the latest master
  cargo install --git https://github.com/mbrea-c/bevy_animation_graph bevy_animation_graph_editor
  # for the version from a local workspace
  cargo install --path <PATH_TO_WORKSPACE> bevy_animation_graph_editor
  
  # use the --force flag to force reinstall
  

Version table

Usage and examples

The documentation in docs.rs contains an introduction of the library and editor and an explanation of a simple animation graph example. See also the video below for a demonstration of editor usage.

Examples are included in the examples directory.

Screenshots

Editor usage demonstration video

NOTE: This video was taken with the last version of the crate. A lot has changed since then!

In YouTube:

Contributing or getting help

If you run into a bug or want to discuss potential new features, feel free to post an issue, open a PR or reach out to me in Discord (@mbreac in the Bevy discord, there's a crate-help post for bevy_animation_graph there: link).

FAQ

Is this ready for production?

Depends.

It can already be useful for small-ish projects, but I cannot guarantee API stability between different 0.x versions (it is a big library, it is relatively young and I don't have previous experience with animation programming, so I'm still figuring out the best ways of doing things). This means that it will likely be necessary to go into your animation graph assets and manually migrate them between versions, at least until I find a better way to handle migrations.

Additionally, there may will be bugs and other issues. I try to get them fixed as they come up.

Will you implement feature X?

If it's a small feature (e.g. some additional vector or floating point arithmetic node) it's likely that I have just not got around to it. If you open an issue I will probably implement it quickly. PRs are also welcome.

For larger features, it's better to start by opening an issue for discussion or pinging me in the Bevy discord.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Bobby Anguelov for his lectures on animation programming.