Content
As you might have already discovered, I'm no professional artist. What I can do is put together a bunch of state logic for certain poses though. The vast majority of animations I show here are procedural and take a one frame pose plus some layered blending logic.
I have a few different animations that I've set up for both first and third person models:
Here's how I made them...
Breathing
When I was playtesting different features, I felt like everything was a bit too static. Plus sometimes it was hard to tell if the game crashed when it was started, or everything was working fine until I tried to play and it was unresponsive and crashing.
I started with a default first person pose. I then essentially turned it into an animation by using float curves to adjust the position of the z axis over time. This created a slight up and down breathing effect that was almost good enough. Adding a curve for every axis can give an almost circular motion that feels a lot more like breathing. Each graph is a little bit different depending on how I felt the movement compared to myself breathing in the same pose.
Weapon Sway
Weapon sway was another one of those things that I thought would be cool, but I didn't think it would be as cool as it was. I know it's not super fancy or special, and most games have it, but I think it really helps make a difference.
Weapon sway is handled by telling the weapons barrel to stay where it is when the player is rotating... at least for the first tick. On the second tick of player rotation, the speed of rotation is now known and, using a little bit of fancy math, the amount of sway is controlled with an equation that uses the speed of ratation, and variables for weapon weight & size. This results in the weapon sway that you see, and each weapon can have it's own sway parameters based on whatever weight and size I give them.
Hand and Foot IK
This is kind of a big one. Until I set up proper hand and foot IK, I was just using a few state machines and animations for my animations. It was great for quick animation setups and getting stuff working, but as I began working on the project more and more, I realized that I would need to get a more comprehensive setup going, otherwise it would be hard to manage. I started doing a bit of research on how to better handle animations, and found the Advanced Locomotion plugin. This system has a bunch of support for all sorts of fancy animations that are mostly procedural. I started studying this system for hours so I could understand how it worked. My aim was not to just plug and play the plugin, but to learn how it worked so I could build my own from the ground up and only use what I actually need... for both performance and organizational reasons.
So that's what I did. I build my own animation graph full of state machines, procedural and additive animations, and a lot of animation blending. Overall, the final result is much better than it was before, despite some bugs that I still need to iron out. Honestly, my favorite part is the fact that the feet automatically readjust to a normal standing position from whatever part of the animation that they're in. The feet will also look for where they should be placed individually, so they can adjust themselves if one foot is sitting on higher ground than the other. This means no more feet just floating off the edge of a cliff :D