The Venom Animator

An eight track (can be compiled for more) animation system is available for every instanced rig. Each track can influence the whole or part of the rig, and be blended with the tracks before it. An efficient animator and blender ensures only the channels of each track that actually contribute to the final pose are processed. And because the blending works on the hierarchical key frames, and not the skinning bones, proper rotation and scalar blending occurs.

The Venom rigging and animation system makes a clear distinction between the source keyable channels, arranged in a hierarchical manner, and the flat bone set used for mesh deformation. The animation clips know nothing about deformation, and the deformation knows nothing about animation.

This allows the hierarchy to be arranged to be easier to animate for the authors, and combined with sub-channel compression actually results in smaller animation data than keyframed bones. A hierarchy is actually a form of data compression in its own right.

This separation allows the animator to be kept distinctly independent of the mesh deforming. This allows replacement animators, such as ragdoll for example, to be easily used.