dem-bones VS o3de

You can also try SSDR (“Smooth Skin Decomposition with Rigid Bones”). Something like this: electronicarts/dem-bones - GitHub https://github.com/electronicarts/dem-bones can help you in getting your skeleton to automatically animate (and automatically weighting your geometry) when you supply an skeleton and an Alembic file. I’d try this option first. There are different implementations of this solver (SOuP, vastSolver, a recent addon in Blender), but if you are comfortable with dealing with the command line you should be able to get something running just with this.

Blender DemBones is an add-on that integrates the open-source project DemBones. It is an automated algorithm that converts mesh animations to bone animations, which can be used for various tasks, including skinning or improving the skinning of rigged models, baking deformation cages, and corrective smooth modifiers. The add-on is fully integrated with DemBones and features such as demLock and partial solving through vertex color. There are six main use cases for the add-on, including converting mesh sequences to bone animations and weights, and partially solving skinning through per-vertex color of the mesh.

If we can offline it, then we will with VATs, geo-caches, or something like Dem-Bones to translate it into an approximation with bones.

It's odd to me that when the whole Unity fiasco happened, everyone was basically looking at either Godot or Unreal, but pretty much nobody mentioned or cared for something like O3DE.

If you praise Godot for being open source a lot, then it stands to reason that you should similarly prefer O3DE as opposed to Unreal: https://github.com/o3de/o3de/blob/development/LICENSE.txt (no idea why they're going for both Apache 2 and MIT license, though) vs https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/license

Unless people just care about the options that are popular enough to warrant their attention and the features that they provide, whereas the licensing is actually a boon, rather than the main factor, given that Unreal also did some slight price increases a while later as well: https://www.unreal-university.blog/post/unreal-engine-5-pric...

Either way, it's still nice to have lots of options available regardless of the licensing details (though this kind of does fragment developers among bunches of different projects), be it Godot, O3DE, Stride, Unreal or even something like jMonkeyEngine (one of the rare Java engines/editors with 3D) or NeoAxis (that one had a cool voxel LOD solution, but performance on AMD hardware was bad).

03DE: Open source game engine, under Apache License 2.0, developed by Amazon and the linux foundation. Seems to work under a modular package called "gems", that you can use to pull in the functionality you need. It uses c++ as it's main language, but you can use Lua, python or visual scripting for scripting stuff. Has multiplayer built into the engine and what they call a "robust" system for open-world games. There seems to be a lot of tutorials on the site, but they aren't laid out great.