   complex animation blending
  Hello,I understand the concept of animation blending and can smoothly blend from one animation to the next. However I have a problem understanding how to go about doing more complex animation blends. To illustrate I will give an example:Assume an NPC character is reloading his weapon and he gets shot by the player. I would then fade in a pain animation. However what I don't understand is what do I do with the currently active reload animation. Do I fade it out? stop it from animating but just layer the pain on top? Once the pain animation is done I would like the NPC character to go back playing his pain animation from where he left off. I am baffled as to how I would go about achieving this.As another example. Let's say the character is hit multiple times. I would like to play several different pain animations. So the first time I play pain animation #1. While that is playing the character gets hit again so I play a different pain animation. What do I do if anything to the original pain animation that is playing? Do I fade it out, just leave it playing and fade in the second pain animation?How do most people handle these types of game scenarios in their games?Many thanks for anyone's help.Hatori   
  It sounds like the kind of animation blending you are most familiar with is a "cross-fade" or linear blend. 100% of the bones for the first animation are blended with 100% of the bones for the second animation, and the weights go from 1 to 0 and 0 to 1 respectively, creating a moment when each animation exerts 50% control over the superset of animation bones from both animations.Take a look at this article for other cool types of blends that will give you the effects you described:http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030704/edsall_02.shtmlAnother thing to think about is blending per bone rather than per skeleton (so-called "feather" blending).   ;  You're one of the best and most helpful members on here Steve.   ;  Thank you Steve!!! This is exactly what I was looking for!Hatori   ;  Another option is additive blending. The idea here is that instead of blending from one animation to the next, you additively blend an animation on top of an already playing animation. An additive animation is created by subtracting a reference pose or a reference animation from a source animation. What results is called a difference animation. This difference animation is then additively blended onto other animations.The UDK has a fairly good overview of the concept: here