530 11. Animation Systems
this pivotal movement, because the person pivots about his vertical axis when
he turns. Second, he can keep facing in one direction, while walking forward,
backward, or sideways (known as strafi ng in the gaming world) in order to
move in a direction that is independent of his facing direction. I’ll call this
targeted movement, because it is oft en used in order to keep one’s eye—or one’s
weapon—trained on a target while moving. These two movement styles are
illustrated in Figure 11.30.Targeted Movement
To implement targeted movement, the animator authors three separate looping
animation clips—one moving forward, one strafi ng to the left , and one straf-
ing to the right. I’ll call these directional locomotion clips. The three directional
clips are arranged around the circumference of a semicircle, with forward at
0 degrees, left at 90 degrees and right at –90 degrees. With the character’s fac-
ing direction fi xed at 0 degrees, we fi nd the desired movement direction on
the semicircle, select the two adjacent movement animations, and blend them
together via LERP-based blending. The blend percentage β is determined by
how close the angle of movement is to the angles of two adjacent clips. This is
illustrated in Figure 11.31.
Note that we did not include backward movement in our blend, for a full
circular blend. This is because blending between a sideways strafe and a back-
ward run cannot be made to look natural in general. The problem is that when
strafi ng to the left , the character usually crosses its right foot in front of its left
so that the blend into the pure forward run animation looks correct. Likewise,
the right strafe is usually authored with the left foot crossing in front of the
right. When we try to blend such strafe animations directly into a backward
run, one leg will start to pass through the other, which looks extremely awk-Figure 11.31. Targeted movement can be implemented by blending together looping locomo-
tion clips that move in each of the four principal directions.