Well basically I blew all of yesterday playing Beyond Good & Evil, but I did talk with the animator about some issues that came up about the animations because of late changes in the design.
Basically because the original specifications never included facial animations, the rig maker never included any sort of facial controls in the animation rigs. So now that the design calls for some eye blinking and minor facial expressions the rig must be redone in order to properly animate it. This complicates a lot of things because if the animation rig is changed, then the models will no longer be able to share animations between versions. Basically every animation would have to be redone in order to get the same effect.
So in order to skip the large amount of misery that it would bring to everyone involved (redoing every animation, me having to reexport/import every animation, and blowing a bunch more weeks doing this) I suggested that the animator only use the new rig for animations that call for facial expressions, and then they would be used in the game as a special case that would replace the regular model with the newer model & rig. This loses compatibility and creates some duplication, and if more animations need facial expressions then it becomes less and less worth it, but for now it'll be the quickest way to get things done.
As for me, I figure I'll get back to making the animation controller which I think will probably just be an extension / wrapper for the regular animation component. After that I think I'm back to the art side of things -> exporting and importing the apartment models.
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