Skeletal animation with multiple animations running at the same time

Question

I've spent a long time attempting to figure out how complex animations are done and wrote quite a few different skeletonish frameworks myself, but they've never really came out good enough to be properly used. So maybe someone here knows how complex things that can have lots of different animations are animated. I know that you can combine different animations to create one larger thing, but that takes A LOT of time and can't be organised properly, or even designed properly if you are attempting to design complex characters.

So I'm wondering whether anyone knows about known techniques for this, I'm willing to write my own implementation of it (Using a quite unpopular language, usually can't find libraries or anything for it). Or a software that you can write an implementation of your own in your own language.

TL;DR: Looking for software / animation theory that can handle applying multiple different animations of the same character.

Spine2D and spriter aren't what I'm looking for.

Answer 1

Look into a package like maya. It is much easier to learn how animation works that way than trying to do it programatically and looking at other people's code. On the game engine side you generally use interpolators to combine multiple animations together, but if you don't pick up the basics animation is very confusing. Even many supposed pro game programmers say some pretty dumb things on the topic because they don't really know much about animations per se, just how various game engines use them.

To get reasonable performance you are probably going to have to use C++ as well.