Sweet. I'll get on that. Just to make sure, every animation cycle has to start with the default pose?
If I remember right, every animation intended to loop should start and end with the same pose, other "play-once" animations obviously start in one pose and end in another (such as standing up from crouching, for example).
A few notes regarding animations with Blender, using the skeleton (forgive me for the parts you already know):
- The blender file I provided is set to 30 FPS. Blender uses a keyframe system and fills in the in-between frames automatically, and the game engine IIRC goes even further by automatically animating the mesh smoothly between frames. If memory serves, with the MD2 format you can have different animations at different speeds in the same file, the text file that goes with the MD2 - also read by the game - lists in an index the starting, stopping, and animation speeds of each animation the game's code calls, along with names for the animations (I think the wiki has an example).
- The file I provided also has a snap-to with the grid and rotation of everything, I think rotation snaps to increments of 5 degrees. You can override this when dragging by holding down CTRL while dragging.
- You can specify rotating a specific axis only by left-clicking an axis arrow-head in pose mode. You can also use the keyboard, press "R" for rotate then the letter of the axis, X, Y, or Z. You can then type the number of degrees you want to rotate, and use a minus sign or decimal point if needed.
- I'd recommend selecting the axis with the keyboard so you can choose between rotating on a *global* or *local* axis. When you first press "R" and then the key for the axis, it defaults to global rotation, pressing the key for the axis a second time switches to local axis of rotation, which is cool because it then rotates related to how the parent bone is, giving you more control and making proper rotation much easier.
- I've found in quick tests that if you plan to twist a limb and hand/foot, it helps to split up the rotation among the different bones (part of the rotation in the shoulder/hip, part in the mid-joint, part in the end, for example). I've also found this works better for the head and neck as well.
- Before final export the head will be replaced by an empty to become a TAG, and TAGs will also be placed in the hands, don't worry about that for now, you should be able to animate without them for now. (The TAGs tell the game where to add the head and carried in-hand objects/weapons.)
- If you accidentally add a keyframe in the wrong place with "I" you can delete it with "CTRL-I" if I remember right. There are also buttons in the upper bar right below the model view for copying, pasting, and mirroring poses, which helps sometimes.
- You can also tweak things in the Action Editor panel for each bone if you know how (If not, don't worry about it).
- Pressing "W" then "clear user transform" will reset all the bones.
- Remember that individual bones can have independent keyframes, you can set them for the whole mesh by selecting all the bones at once and then adding a keyframe.
- The arrow keys navigate between keyframes. Changing frames resets the bones to the last pose, so after making one keyframe, *first* advance to a new keyframe and *then* work on a new pose, otherwise you can lose all your changes for the next pose (I've suffered this mistake myself...
).
Have fun!
Edit: If I'm wrong on any of these points, anyone is free to correct me.
Edit(2): If the skeleton needs work or should be re-done, please let me know...
