14 réponses à ce sujet

[Eguintir Eligard]

I have got myself a simple creature to try out animations on. You can observe the idle, walk, and attack01 animations I have made already as I experiment to gain proficiency with this before I complete project fatty.

 

Here it is sorry it's a little blurry

 

I have an animation for 3ds max question first:

 

I notice when animating this while my rotations seem ok and part of my movement, it seems there were some errors. For example in the attack window, I wanted him to rise up and back, curl his tail and then dart straight down and at the player. The monster does do this, but in 3ds max, it looks like he reared back from frame 0, rather than waiting until the key frame I set at frame 4 to start. Yet all the rotation movements I performed did wait until the key frame 4 as intended. Why do my movements tend to get applied to the entire sequence rather than waiting? 

 

I don't know a tonne about the process yet but basically my steps are:

1-click autokey mode so the animation is red in the bar

2-move to a frame I want to make movements occur. Click the key Icon

3-Perform movements etc

4-repeat step 2

 

If this sequence sound right then is it possible I didn't click a key or had autokey mode off when I moved the pieces? It's happened a few times so really bugging me.

 

 

 

 

An animation for NWN2 question:

I followed the guidelines of attacking in a 1 second sequence, and putting the deepest part of the attack at .33 seconds in. However it seems really fast... I wanted my float eye to draw back a little more slowly and higher... and then come back hard at the player. Is there any advice on this or do attacks simply have to be that fast without much preamble?

 

Follow up question: When should the una_idlefidget fire? It doesn't seem to be working at all.

 

 

 

I invite any commentary on the animations themselves. Basically I figured this creature is anti gravity so for his walking animation he uses only a slight tail wiggle to move about. A more exaggerated full body wriggle would be used for running. As for the idle, he bobs slowly up and down. I was hoping the fidget animation would make his tail swish side to side but its still not working. I have already since much improved the attack animation... rather than the tiny poke it does now, it rears up high and back and stabs right into the player.

[Hellfire_RWS]

I will try and help, but first i have to ask. Are you using CAT (character animation toolkit) or are you just animating with the tools available in max?

[Eguintir Eligard]

Just doing the standard set.

[Hellfire_RWS]

This is one way to do it

 

Load up your UnA_Idle animation

 

1. Select everything in the scene and delete all animation keys between first and last key.

 

2.Advance the animation time slider to the height of the curled up "prepared to strike" pose

 

3.Turn on auto key

 

4.Pose the creature into the curled up pose

5. advance time slider to max point of impact "attack"

6. Pose for the attack frame.

7.Turn off auto key

 

View animation

 

if you need to refine any "in between" motion simply advance to that time, turn on auto key, pose and then turn off auto key.

 

this is simply how I work and is not the only way to do it.

 

Auto key is not required to animate. you could skip autokey completely.  With autokey off, post the creature and click on the key. this should lock the current transformations to that frame. perhaps using autokey and the key is causing an issue.

[Eguintir Eligard]

Yes maybe! I have a nice primary attack animation now.

 

Any thoughts at all on this UNA_IDLEFIDGET problem?

[Hellfire_RWS]

Idle fidget usually only plays when when you are idle on the keyboard for a while.i don't recall how long that is

[Eguintir Eligard]

Isn't there something for npc though? Is it called twitch maybe? I want my fatty to occasionally scratch his giant ass but not nonstop. He's Classy.

[Dann-J]

Isn't there something for npc though? Is it called twitch maybe? I want my fatty to occasionally scratch his giant ass but not nonstop. He's Classy.

 

Idle humanoid NPCs will play a range of random animations (sigh, search, look to one side, etc). I don't know if that's part of the standard script set, or whether it's hard-coded behaviour. They don't seem to need to have immobile ambient animations activated either (unless the standard OnSpawn script does that by default).

 

If you were willing to experiment, and had plenty of time on your hands, you could create a neutral humanoid NPC and just watch them standing around in the game. It'd be like watching paint dry or grass grow, but eventually you might recognise some of the standard animations. There's one called 'scratchhead' that you could name your own animation after (even if it's not his head that he scratches). I'm sure I've seen NPCs scratch their heads from time to time.

 

Of course, there's nothing stopping you from calling your own animation anything you want, and giving fatty his own custom scripts to play it.

[Eguintir Eligard]

Well I don't want my character to need custom scripts, he will be drop in and play ready. So I could simply use the scratchhead animation and title it as such, but the actual animated result would entail me substituting ass for head. (Giggity I just realized as I wrote that...).

 

So there is no reliably more often occurring animation I could use to make sure he occasionally does a certain animation with default scripts?

[Dann-J]

They seem to be all delightfully / horribly random. The only way to tell which ones are used more often would be to observe an idle NPC for hours on end, taking careful note of each random animation, then tallying how often each occurred. Then some sort of statistical report (with mandatory pie charts) would seem to be in order.

[4760]

I see two ways of achieving this:

1. have a basic idle animation, and some special animations whose starting and ending frames exactly match the idle animation's ones. Through the creature heartbeat, call PlayCustomAnimation depending on random numbers.
2. make the idle animation a rather long one, with the special animations included. It will not be random, but the animations will play (and the farther they are in the animation schedule, the less chances they have to happen as some external events may cause the creature to do other things, thus resetting the idle animation to frame 0).

I don't know what NWN2 uses (or if there's a third way of doing this).

[Eguintir Eligard]

I can do number 2??that's how I set out initially before I found out fidgety was seperate. I figured it was all just one long routine. I'll do that then

[Dann-J]

I was testing something in the toolset last night, and as soon as I ran the area in the game a neutral NPC standing near the start point yawned and then scratched his head soon after (two ambient animations in a row!). Lots of other NPCs looked around quite a bit after a while - they seemed to look left more often than right. One of them played the sigh animation at one point, and quite a few adopted an alert posture (it might have been the unarmed combat idle stance).

 

Now that I find myself looking at random ambient animations, it's hard to concentrate on what I'm *actually* trying to test.

[4760]

I don't know what NWN2 uses (or if there's a third way of doing this).

In the toolset, open the animation visualization plug-in (or open the lod-merged.zip file): you'll see quite a list of available animations, like SCRATCH_HEAD, SIGH, TIRED_IDLE, LOOK_RIGHT, LOOK_LEFT, etc...

I didn't check if "hench_io_ai" (which is used by the standard NPC heartbeat script and which includes "PlayMobileAnimations()" and "PlayImmobileAnimations()" functions) uses tags or string variables (in which case it should be easy to add a few new ambient animations) or if the list is hard-coded.

[Eguintir Eligard]

I like number 2. I just hope the scripts in default are smart enough not to fire if I don't have those animations because if they do it will reset my long long long idle animation