While David has been doing a lot of intense lighting and shading work for the Phoenix Engine, he also manages to have mini-projects going at the same time.  One of his projects was to create an initial procedural animation system for character movement

In my first developer’s diary I mentioned our development ethic of starting with the simplest case first and then layering on complexity.  This video shows this approach in action. You can see how David first represents a character as a sphere, then as a snowman and then he adds marching feet and appendages.  The end result was affectionately named "Rabbot" by the Wolfire fans.  Feel free to check out the HD Version

While the animation system is still far from done, it is interesting to see the initial process that David has gone through so far to get characters up and running in engine.  For now this is simply a hard-coded procedure to make sure that a character’s feet always actually step on the ground and that the knee and hip of each leg, link appropriately to place the feet where they need to be.  We are about to start work on a formal animation system soon so you can expect more-polished animations from us in the future. To get more Overgrowth development news, be sure to check out the Wolfire Blog