Transition animations (animation blending)?

Hi everyone.

What I mean is, say you have an idle animation and a running animation. The player holds the movement key down and the character stops his idle animation and starts (duh) running. Player then lets go of the run key and the character then snaps back into his idle pose.

In most instances that works just fine. But sometimes that can create an incredibly jarring effect as the characters just snaps back into his idle pose from a full blown run. The same can happen when he STARTS running, to go from idle to running in a split second can look pretty odd in some cases. I guess it can depend on the art used and how smooth some of your animations are.

I've tried creating some intermediate animations to deal with it. An idle into a run animation for instance that plays and when it ends the normal run animation starts. It works great, very smooth and fluid. But what about stopping?

Stopping is where I need help. This is tricky to explain so bear with me lol. I have a run animation 10 frames long. I also have a stop running into an idle animation about 5 frames long.

If the player stops holding the run key down at the exact second the running frame matches first frame of the stop running animation then it works awesome. But if they let go of the key at any one of the other 9 frames of the running animation it puts me back to square one, a jarring transition into a transition animation lol.

Obviously creating 10 different sets of transition animations to account for every frame of the running animation is out of the question.

So I guess what I'm asking is there any way to do this a bit easier? Have you ever tried anything like this before? What were your experiences like? Sorry for being so long winded, hopefully you know what I'm getting at.

Thanks guys.

Can you just make a third animation Run->Stop

So when player release button you finish playing the run animation until frame 10, then when that is done you trigger the Run->stop animation and when that is done you play the idle one.

I did try that actually, it works but there's an awkward few moments where the character is literally standing still while the run animation continues to play. It doesn't quite look right.

It's also dependent on when the player lets go off the movement key. If they happen to let go of the key on the first frame of the run animation the entire run animation plays and then the runstop animation, it looks bad. If they let go on the last frame the runstop animation plays immediately and it looks good lol.

Not quite sure where to go from here.

I see, I unfortunately havent made any games or a lot in general with character animation in C2 so not really sure how people normally do it.

Guess someone with some experience on this can probably help you better