Can an animation be made interactive?

Question

I am relatively new at blender with maybe a years worth of experience on and off. Basically i have been using blender primarily to create good quality animations of product assembly and disassembly and good quality rendered images. I do this by importing STL files off Inventor (CAD) and re-assembling them into blender with blender's own constraints.

I have created an animation with text about how to set up an electrical component on a product through blender. Basically the animation shows a control panel of an electronic devices's screen then plays the product moving with the associated screen displayed on the device in the screen.

Ultimately what i would like to know is if the devices's control panel can be interactively operated by the viewer like a simulation and have the animation respond accordingly to the controls. I understand that this may be going into the blender game engine side of things which i know nothing about. So just a point in the right direction will be a huge help.

I would also like to know if the animation i have already created can be combined with the blender game engine side of things if it is to go that way.

Below is a screen shot of the control panel (top right corner) and the product that i would like to see react to the controller.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

what i would like to know is if the devices's control panel can be interactively operated by the viewer like a simulation and have the animation respond accordingly to the controls

Yes, this is possible. Think about it like a menu with buttons. As the BGE uses 3D scenes for renderings the buttons can be anywhere in the scene.

I would also like to know if the animation i have already created can be combined with the blender game engine

This depends on what the animations are doing. Not all features of the Blender animation system are supported.

The major difference is that you play one action per object. This means when you want to play actions (or one action) that involve several different objects you need to play these actions at each of that objects (and start them at the same time). There is no "global animation" as in Blender.

Remarks:

I strongly suggest to play around with the BGE and see how logic gets defined.