Hello
I’m willing to help where I can. I just learned how to load and play animations for the character today, actually. You’ll NEED to know how to script, in order to have custom animations. Anywhere you’re willing to start, ask away and I’ll try my best to assist you!! CFrames and character Animations are two different things. CFrame focuses on individual parts and their position/orientation. Animations focus on the entirety of the selected parts within a model, if I’m not mistaken. I find it WAY, WAY easier to make an animation in animation editor, other than working with CFrames.
Ok, I’ve animated before and I still don’t know what c-frames are so don’t worry about that. The only things you need are a rig to animate, the animation editor, and the knowledge of how to make a play animation script (or a scripter). Once you have all that and some practice, you can do basic animations.
CFrames are only needed if you actually want to move an Object (in this case probably the player) to another location. The thing with animating, if you move the character in the animation, it doesn’t actually move the character. So most of the time the character isnt moved in the animation, but thats dont later with cframes. So for starters, you don’t have to learn cframes yet, especially if you just want to learn how to animate!
Hmm, I would I be able to make animations like this (I’m getting confused on the lines and all that, and how to get certain objects and animate them.) I can do a basic animation though.
If a game uses custom CFrame math for animations it’s usually because it’s doing something that the built in animation system can’t handle.
The built in animations are forward kinematic, meaning the animations are computed relative to the root of the rig and don’t directly react to the world. While these do CFrame math internally, the tools to make these are designed so you don’t need to work with CFrames directly at all. You could get by without even knowing CFrames exist, because the animation is done through the animation editor.
For custom animation systems, one common use case would be inverse kinematics, where the rig reacts to some external factor in the world. One common use case for this is making feet step on ground that physically exists in the game world, reacting to it. Whether you need CFrames or not really depends on the team that you’re working with though. Some teams may have custom tools that allow creation of animations without the need to dig into the details like CFrames, so it isn’t strictly necessary.
Special effects like the ones shown in the gifs above are often separate layers on top of the animation system. The extra details like glowing parts, particle effects, sphere shockwaves are done separately with scripting in addition to the animations. Same with the special movement behaviors. Some of these effects do require CFrame usage, and some don’t. It depends on if there is an object in the API that you can use to get around the problem or not, like beams.
The animations on their own wouldn’t include any of the additional effects, and would look pretty plain because they’re a base to be built on. If you want to make those special effects you would need to do some scripting, or work on a team where someone works with you to handle the effects while you handle the animations.
My main focal point is the lines themselves and them moving is what I’m having trouble with. (More specifically the red slashes and the rings on the upwards attack move)
You would need to do that with scripting. You need to create the objects at the precise timing in the animation they’re needed at, update them for their entire life time, and then clean them up afterwards with scripts. Changing the object size doesn’t need CFrames, but moving and rotating do.
You would likely need some kind of animation management system to make sure they happen at the correct times too.
These kinds of polished features hardly ever come as their own standalone package. There are a lot of moving parts from a lot of different disciplines that come together to make things like what was shown in the gifs.
You could animate the lines by several methods, but any form of animation that isn’t completely physics-based will require scripting, unless… You could build an optical illusion, create a Trail, maybe a Beam, the posing of the character will depend on which route you’re willing to go, but either way it requires scripting to load an AnimationTrack, or posing using CFrames. Here’s understanding CFrames to help you out. To add on, animating with bones isn’t limited to players, you could create the slashing effects as 3D models with bones, then pose the slashes in the animation editor the way you want, too!
