Game skeletons animated from the creator's own mocap clips

Stefan 3D AI@Stefan_3D_AI

Day 11. Building the game I've dreamed of for 15 years with AI.

I thought humanoid animations would be the easy part. Then I spent half the night trying to get a skeleton to swing its arm.

I wanted that awkward, broken skeleton movement. GPT-6 Astra couldn't get the attack right in Blender on its own, even though other parts were working. Time to bring in some of my own animation knowledge.

Three things I tried:

1. Recorded myself doing the arm swing, turned the video into mocap, and gave that animation to Codex. I asked it to fix just the arm, keeping the parts that already worked.

2. Put my generated Seedance video references through mocap too. They converted surprisingly well. The free option I tried was Unreal Engine 5.8; Quick Magic was the paid one. Both gave me motion I could use.

3. Let the agent try Cascadeur through its MCP server. It set up AutoPosing and experimented with AutoPhysics. This part is still inconclusive for me. The MCP integration felt too limited to call it a reliable part of the workflow yet.

GPT-6 took those mocap clips and assembled the final animations. About six or seven rounds, roughly half an hour each. Today I got the skeletons into the game, and I'm so happy with how they turned out.

I'm already working on the archers. For difficult movements, I'll be using mocap references much more often now. GPT can take just an arm movement from a clip and adjust the rest itself. Being able to combine those two approaches is what finally got this working for me.