Animations

[Sheekel]

Is there any work being done on a new animation system? If not is are there plans for such work in the future?

[Tobi]

AFAIK no one is working on a new animation system currently.

Personally I don't have plans to start working on it anytime soon

[Warlord Zsinj]

at the very least, better opk-cob output from upspring would be great...

[Zpock]

I'm having some far off visions of a spring fantasy game, with proper importable skeletal animation as a prime necessity among many other things like melee combat and formations. I guess it's sort of a chicken and egg thing?

[Warlord Zsinj]

skeletal animation would make me happy in the pants

Especially when it comes time to do the jedi...

[Sheekel]

Ok I was just wondering, I'm going to be redoing a lot of the cavedog animations to make them look more realistic, probably in upspring or servo.

I also considered creating a true walk script for all the kbots but it doesnt really seem necessary, the benefits are only visible on particularly large units.

[SwiftSpear]

Adding skeletal animation is something I'd like to see... but ultimately the animation system spring uses will probably have to stay in a script format similar to the way it works right now. Spring does a tonne of procedural animating, it would be an epic epicload of work implementing an animation system that changed the way animations are handled procedurally.

[rattle]

Mesh deformations would be nice though.

[smoth]

I would just be happy if upspring's rotation issue was fixed, if that worked then we could use upspring to do anims as it has an export.

[Zpock]

Upspring lack inverse kinematics, which you need to make walking and such that don't suck.

[Das Bruce]

Upspring lack inverse kinematics, which you need to make walking and such that don't suck.

You don't need inverse kinematics to make your animations not suck, have you even looked at any of the blood-sweat-and-tears bos/cob animations people have done, and with upspring hell even I made a half decent chicken walking anim. What we need is an exporter so it's relatively easy to get something meaningful out of it.

[Vadi]

Author: kloot
Date: 2008-04-28 14:09:00 +0200 (Mon, 28 Apr 2008)
New Revision: 5797

Modified:
trunk/rts/Sim/Features/Feature.cpp
trunk/rts/Sim/Features/Feature.h
trunk/rts/Sim/Features/FeatureHandler.cpp
trunk/rts/Sim/Features/FeatureHandler.h
trunk/rts/Sim/Units/Unit.cpp
trunk/rts/Sim/Units/Unit.h
Log:
make units transfer their speed to the wrecks (features) they
create when dying, to ease the transition between fast-moving
unit and static wreck (also creates cool effects like eg. ship
wrecks sliding onto shore and aircraft wrecks falling in nice
parabolic arcs rather than straight down like deflating blimps)

better animations!

[Zpock]

Upspring lack inverse kinematics, which you need to make walking and such that don't suck.

You don't need inverse kinematics to make your animations not suck, have you even looked at any of the blood-sweat-and-tears bos/cob animations people have done, and with upspring hell even I made a half decent chicken walking anim. What we need is an exporter so it's relatively easy to get something meaningful out of it.

Yes I have of course seen all the standard COB scripts done, but I have also done a few scripts using IK, manually (yes copy pasting hundreds of numbers) translating it to COB script and the result is much better, with a real exporter to do this you would get much better animations at a fraction of the effort. Really it's no different then arguing that one could just as well draw the model in upspring by some minimal tools instead of having a way of importing it from proper programs. Of course, it wouldn't hurt to be able to and would be better then the current situation, I just don't think it's the best option.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b5jtx-q3eM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaJQIdOaZa4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRShAIqoU-w

[smoth]

thing is zpock for ik we need to do skeletal rigging which is not easy or fun by and large it will require the usage of blender or something the equivalent of 3dsmax.

correct me if I am wrong but effectively all IK does is apply forces to parts based on the joints pulled or pushed. I may well be wrong so feel free to educate me, I would like to know more. I do not understand how it would be different from using keyframe positioning and then placing the parts. Spring already handles the transition and you have been able to export your animations into a cob script. Which you still have not told anyone how to do yet, HUGE

the issue here with upspring is not the exporter it is that upspring CANNOT handle rotations greater then ~120!

[Zpock]

Here is how I did:

1: setup bones that closely resemble the way pieces are setup in upsring using an animation program (blender, maya, 3dsmax etc)

2: animate those bones into a simple walking animation using IK, that is make the foot and body follow paths and have the different parts of the leg adjust properly.

3: Export from 10-50 frames of this animation into cob script by copy/pasting 100ds of numbers. This is the stupid amount of manual work part which could be automated.

4: Find the errors made in step 3...

5: manually adjust things to make it look better if necessary.

Im sure you could put some simple IK in upspring as well, but there's tons of different things you can do in a real animation software that will never be there, like weighting the different joints, messing around with the keys and speed of the animation to be non-linear etc.

[smoth]

can the objects of the models not be used to simulate a bone? specifying what parts are hinge and ball joints?

[Zpock]

I have no idea really, I use wings for modeling and don't want to dick around with trying to export/import I just make a bare-bones skeleton of the relevant parts with the relative piece positions that I setup in upspring.

I don't really know that much about animation, I just learned the necessary parts to setup a nice script with the above method.

[Das Bruce]

I don't really know that much about animation

Yeah, we noticed, learn some more before you try and sound definitive.

[KDR_11k]

Adding skeletal animation is something I'd like to see... but ultimately the animation system spring uses will probably have to stay in a script format similar to the way it works right now. Spring does a tonne of procedural animating, it would be an epic epicload of work implementing an animation system that changed the way animations are handled procedurally.

Most if not all games with skeletal anim also have controls the game logic can exert on them to handle aiming and such, in the old Half-Life there were controller bones that could be rotated in code and stuff like that. Skeletal anim doesn't lock code-based stuff out completely, it just allows you to use much better WYSIWYG tools for animating.

Skeletal anim is much easier to use than this piece crap IMO. Sure, rigging takes a bit more time than just making each piece a bone if you want good deformation but Spring-like rigs don't take long to make either and would save us the effort of using a separate program (with a tendency to screw things up) to edit the origins. Animations are MUCH faster to make if you can actually see what you are doing. My COB walkcycles don't go beyond 4 keyframes each, even my crappiest skeletal walk anims have 8 and I really suck at animating.

[Zpock]

I don't really know that much about animation

Yeah, we noticed, learn some more before you try and sound definitive.

Yeah maybe I should just spew vague bullshit and flames instead with no work to show for it.

Adding skeletal animation is something I'd like to see... but ultimately the animation system spring uses will probably have to stay in a script format similar to the way it works right now. Spring does a tonne of procedural animating, it would be an epic epicload of work implementing an animation system that changed the way animations are handled procedurally.

Most if not all games with skeletal anim also have controls the game logic can exert on them to handle aiming and such, in the old Half-Life there were controller bones that could be rotated in code and stuff like that. Skeletal anim doesn't lock code-based stuff out completely, it just allows you to use much better WYSIWYG tools for animating.

Skeletal anim is much easier to use than this piece crap IMO. Sure, rigging takes a bit more time than just making each piece a bone if you want good deformation but Spring-like rigs don't take long to make either and would save us the effort of using a separate program (with a tendency to screw things up) to edit the origins. Animations are MUCH faster to make if you can actually see what you are doing. My COB walkcycles don't go beyond 4 keyframes each, even my crappiest skeletal walk anims have 8 and I really suck at animating.

The problem is that today what we have concerning animation is the equivalent of setting up models vertex by vertex in a custom text format using notepad. Do we want to spend our effort on making a simple graphical editor to make this process slightly easier or find a way to tap into the existing tools and stuff that exist? The people who really do know how alot about animation won't touch spring modding with a 10ft pole until it's done, just as noone would make models unless they could use proper software instead of some crappy homemade vertex-by-vertex editor.