When Omni Animation releases in beta this summer you will be able to download generated animations in fbx or bvh format. One of the fun things that we have been experimenting with is the idea of providing an API so you can load the generated animations dynamically.
A great use case for this is if you are developing an RPG with a character customization screen. In this scenario the player can customize their character, and based on the player’s customization the Omni Animation API can generate an animation that matches the character’s look.
With this setup the player doesn’t even have to specify the animation parameters. All of the parameters can be retrieved from the physical characteristics of the customized character. Lets take a look at our prototype.
In this prototype there are three different characters: a generic character, a zombie, and a ninja. By default the animations are standard animations that are not meant for any specific character type. With the API layer we could generate animations that match the characters:
The animations in this video were generated with Omni Animation but the API layer does not exist so they were instead pre-generated and retrieved from a server. This video was created with Unity and we used Asset Bundles to pull in the new set of animations which makes it really flexible. There aren’t any limitations to how your animation system is setup. While this prototype uses Unity we also plan on extending support to other programs.