   designing a state based tree skeleton animation system
  Hi!Does anyone know any good articles or resources, or can offer me some advice on designing such a node based system?I looked but am unable to fix on how some of the finer details should be done.Thanks.   
  You're going to need to be more specific on what it is you want, your title is just an amalgamation of loosely related words.I can give you an overview of what I think you mean, perhaps it'll give you some google terms or put some ideas in your head...You have a skeletal hierarchy where each node represents a bone.  Each node holds some state, depending on your application this state might include:* A matrix for transformations in bone-space (and perhaps another matrix for it's absolute transformation),* physical properties such as length, friction, tensile strength,* restrictive limits of movement like limited angles and degrees of freedom.An animation is then simply a sequence of state-changes that is applied each bone; every bone will have it's own unique sequence.To calculate the absolute matrix of a bone you iterate depth-first through the hierarchy and concatenate (using matrix multiplication) each matrix.  So the absolute matrix of any given bone is equal to all it's parent nodes' bone-space matrices multiplied together along with with it's own.   ;  aha, sorry for any ambiguity. But I did not mean the skeleton itself, I meant the way of managing animations, using different blending nodes and such, and then in the game engine calling the engine and telling the animation a state it should be in. The game engine will then manage the blend tree to transition nicely to that state.I only vaguely know how an api for this kind of system should look.   