Interaction animation between two characters. Need help.

joarwho

Hi guys,
I have a theoretical problem. I have been thinking a lot about this the last couple of days and I can't come up with a solution. Google haven't been of much help.

Here goes: What if I wanted to make a game where I want the player to be able to walk up behind an enemy and do a stealth kill where the main character grabs the enemy and breaks his neck. The problem is if I walk up to the character and press the kill button the animations start playing, but there is nothing that put the characters in place. How do I snap the characters into the correct position and make the sequence play the way it is intended? How do I make it look like the characters are actually interacting with each other?

I would really appreciate your help!

Eric Chadwick

The way I've seen this done is you add attach points on the models, so the attacker's hand attack point will snap to the victim's neck attach point. The attacker will perform his "stealth approach" animation until the points are within a determined range of each other, then an animation will be played that brings the hand to its position on the neck. Then both characters play their attack/die anims in synch, and it looks good. But in reality they're still disconnected from one another, they're not really connected in any sense.