Hi guys, I found these flash gadgets of cute animals made by aBowman. Try play with them, and you’ll find these 3D cartoon style pets very intriguing!

Dog:  http://abowman.com/google-modules/dog/
Hamster:  http://abowman.com/google-modules/hamster/

This brings me to the question of how he made them. I de-compiled them and found aBowman was using away3d as its 3D engine, but the animations don’t seem to be a set of predefined animations. e.g. the dog can look at any direction at any phase of walking or running. The animation of the dog’s head seems to be independent of the animation of the dog’s body. To my knowledge, in away3d, I can only choose to play one animation sequence (like idle, walk, run, attack, etc.) from a fixed set of animations at a time.

Also, if you take a close look at the hamster, the rendered result is of very high quality. The outline is very smooth and of constant line width, which I cannot achieve by simply using the OutlineMethod provided by away3d’s API. And there’s this white area on the hamster’s chin and two line segments indicating the hamster’s forelegs. I have no idea how to render those either.

Does anybody have any idea about how this was done?

It’s totally possible in Away3D to blend several animations together, and on top of that, it’s possible for you to manually take control of a skeleton to which a geometry is bound. Just update the joint poses manually. However, this means using the engine at a fairly advanced level, and does require some understanding both of how skeletal animation works in general and how it’s implemented internally in Away3D in particular.

Thanks for the reply! Can I manually update the joint poses while simultaneously playing an imported animation?

Yes, you should, as long as your changes are applied after the animator has applied it’s changes. But you’ll have to implement logic to properly blend between the pre-defined skeletal animation and your procedural changes, of course.

You might also be able to implement your own blend tree nodes that take some sort of external logic (e.g. mouse cursor position) into consideration but I’m personally not entirely familiar with giving advise here without experimenting with it myself.