Well, did not expect to make this but here we are (Patreon)

Well lads, here's a bit of nerdy animation stuffThe current/popular Blender animation pipeline has so many accumulated errors that Lenster and I ended up rebuilding almost the whole thing. We made a new import/export pipeline, added support for B-Splines, built a website that processes the conversions on the backend, and created a Blender addon to make the whole workflow as painless as possible.✧ Here's a comparison showing how much body animation errors accumulate in the current glTF pipeline compared to our GR2Lab - video And that's only what's visible in Blender. Once you load the animation into the game, the errors become even more noticeable. In extreme cases, a character sitting on another character's hips can end up somewhere around their head.One of the biggest issues we found was that the game animations apparently use B-Spline interpolation, while the importer evaluates them using linear interpolation (Lerp). That difference alone introduces a surprising amount of drift over the course of an animation, that's not all thoThe current animation modding pipeline usually looks something like this:

Current pipelineBG3 source GR2 → LSLib → glTF → Blender → cleanup/fix accumulated errors → make changes → export to glTF → import into the gameOur pipelineDrag & Drop BG3 GR2 → automatic conversion through the website via the addon → make changes → export back to GR2 (through GR2Lab) → gameTo be clear, this isn't about replacing existing tools. LSLib and Norbyte's work moved the community a long way from the old GR2 → DAE → Noesis FBX → Blender pipeline, and glTF was a massive improvement at the time. I'm grateful for all the work Norbyte has put into the modding tools over the years and I also completely understand if he wouldn't be a fan of our approach, especially since we used clankers to help track down the interpolation issues and write parts of the code (even tho we used only GR2 for tests and did not peek into his code itself).

I simply reached a point where those limitations started getting in the way, particularly with more complex body animations involving two characters. So instead of working around them, we decided to solve them.After all spirit of modding all about - if nobody do it - do yourselfAnd yes... We spent several days staring at Karlach's romance scene, measuring distances between her and the player frame by frame, trying to figure out why everything kept drifting apart.Not exactly what you'd expect from someone who keeps saying they don't do sexualized projects, innit?

✧ I don't know when I'll release the tool yet. I'm still testing it on more anims. After all, I have around 50 Karlach anims to fix (quarter done tho), so they'll make for a pretty good stress test.

Once I'm confident everything is working well and the pipeline is stable, I'll share it