How to rebuild a FlareActor when changing its animation?

[ChoLianJiet]

Hi, I am currently changing the animations of a Minion's flr file which i forked on Flare website.

There's 4 animations provided and i have added 4 buttons to change the same flr file's animation.

However, everytime when i change one animation to another, the Minion seems to stop at the position of the previous animation at the point where i changed the animation by clicking on another button, and starting animating the new animation.

What i think was to rebuild the FlareActor so the Minion will start all over again with the new animation. But how do i go about this?

The minion file is this:-
https://www.2dimensions.com/a/kautuk/files/flare/bob-minion

[luigi-rosso]

You can achieve what you want without rebuilding the FlareActor. Each animation needs to reset what the other animations change. This has been brought up in a few other issues, we need to do a more comprehensive manual and blog article to help explain this.

The basic concept is that Flare allows animations to be blended together, but to support this the results of a previous animation must propagate forward to avoid odd skips/pops between frames. This allows you to play an animation at any point and smoothly transition to the next, but you must ensure that frames that are changed in one animation are also keyed in the other, or at least at the start of each animation you re-key what has changed to your design pose. This doesn't have to be for everything, just for the nodes, bones, shapes that you don't explicitly key in the current animation which are moved in another/previous animation.

[ChoLianJiet]

How do I key the animation to another animation?

[saulmc]

You can achieve what you want without rebuilding the FlareActor. Each animation needs to reset what the other animations change. This has been brought up in a few other issues, we need to do a more comprehensive manual and blog article to help explain this.

The basic concept is that Flare allows animations to be blended together, but to support this the results of a previous animation must propagate forward to avoid odd skips/pops between frames. This allows you to play an animation at any point and smoothly transition to the next, but you must ensure that frames that are changed in one animation are also keyed in the other, or at least at the start of each animation you re-key what has changed to your design pose. This doesn't have to be for everything, just for the nodes, bones, shapes that you don't explicitly key in the current animation which are moved in another/previous animation.

+1 for some much-needed documentation on this. We figured it out eventually through trial and error, but finding the offending nodes that need to be keyed remains a major time sink. In some cases we have simply had to give up on blending and created explicit transition animations instead (for instance, keying unused path vertices doesn't seem to reset them after an animation that has explicitly used them).

Would be happy to share more detailed feedback/suggestions on this; it's our top issue with Flare, which we're otherwise having a great experience with!

[umberto-sonnino]

Hey @saulmc, thanks a lot for your feedback, and if you have any more suggestions, we'd love to hear them!
You can shoot us an email at info@2dimensions.com

[nitneuq33]

Same observation, any solutions ?

[nitneuq33]

I don't know why mignon doesn't work https://www.2dimensions.com/a/kautuk/files/flare/bob-minion while teddy works correctly https://www.2dimensions.com/a/JuanCarlos/files/flare/teddy/preview. I don't understand :" Each animation needs to reset what the other animations change."