Developer uses GPT-6 Astra to animate a game knight
A developer used Astra to research animation transfer and skeleton retargeting, and had it write a small Blender pose-feedback tool, finishing the knight's full animation set in a few hours.
Day 14. Building the game I've dreamed of for 15 years with AI. I saved the knight on a white horse for last. I was convinced he'd be a nightmare to animate, so I kept putting him off. Once I started, it was much more manageable than I'd imagined. Guys, don't be like me. Getting started was the hardest part. The model took the least time. I used Tripo P2.0 with the new Smart UV, and I'm so happy with how the horse turned out. I prepared the armor and kept the rider separate so I could rig everything properly. Big thanks to Tripo for this one. GPT-6 Astra helped me research the animation setup. I found a $19 horse-riding pack for Unreal, even though my game is in Unity. It had no combat, but it gave us a good foundation. I did some of the transfer manually. Astra helped bring the animations across and sort out the skeleton, then retarget and adapt the movement to my character. For combat, we took arm swings from Mixamo warriors and mixed in mocap I'd recorded myself. A bit of a Frankenstein, and it worked. This has become my favorite way to build animations. Almost every clip needs adapting. I had soldier animations that were about 90% right, except the footwork looked awful in my game. With Astra, I redid the legs and kept the arm and sword movement. Now I review a clip, point out what needs changing, and choose which movements to combine. I even had Astra make a little Blender tool for pose feedback. I can move an arm wider at a particular frame and save the pose with a comment. It can then use that exact pose to correct the animation. Much easier than trying to explain it all in words. The first characters took a lot of figuring out. With this workflow in place, the knight's full animation set took just a few hours. I finally have the complete roster for the first playable level, with all their animations and even some VFX. Sound effects and a bit more game logic are still missing. Seeing all these units together makes me ridiculously happy.
This post quotes another post: x.com/stefan_3d_ai/status/2101261512090554385