In my opinion the OTA animation scripting is a really dated system. I'm not entirely sure what would be involved in moving to one of the new standard animation types but it would make animation alot easier being that many modeling suites include imbedded animation options. It would make organic animation look good which would help many mods, and it could solve some nasty copywrite problems that we have with the occational use of OTA script information in many of our mods.
Short and sweet but this is something I'd really like to know. I'd love to do animation for TAS units but I can't figure out animation script, it's too different from the standards I know.
Is it plausable to create a new animation system?
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SwiftSpear
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SwiftSpear
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Mostly just the development environment. If we impliment one of the well accepted skeletal animation systems they can be worked up in the modeling suites and exported, meaning I can see directly what my animation changes are doing without having to play with coding figures, compile, then evaluate after all that.
The first step to this is abstracting the model rendering system. This is not an awful lot of work, but it is very boring work. There was someone investigating into this ("child" on this forum), but I think he lost interest. Hopefully when sync is done we get some new linux people working on it, or something...
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SwiftSpear
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There should be standard libraries for making it work much the way video rendering works. Like zaphod said, it probably wouldn't be the most fun project out there but I think it could be one of the projects that would be the most benificial to spring, expecially for our modders.Zenka wrote:Your suggesting Spring should be compatable with animation techniques like IKbones? If that would be possible,it would be a great improvement. It would allow us to make complex movements, such as decent walking.
It would be a load of work to make it possible, I fear...
What would make sense to me
What could make sense to me would be to simply keep the current system, but use bones in the place of parts. Moving the peewee's left arm is still moving the peewee's left arm, except that now you're moving the left-arm-bone. Only difference is now meshes can span multiple parts, and you use weighted vertices to make the animations smooth.
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Pathfinder
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That sort of bone system could work although im not sure how much work it is to code in wheighted vertices and what not. What would be greate is to have a program similar to Servo (I think thats the program). In this program you move the parts to the desired location and take a snapshot of the movedata. You can also view how the animation would look in game so that you dont have to keep going into spring each time to see how it looks.
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SwiftSpear
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Re: What would make sense to me
Well, this is essentially what animators would be doing behind the scenes. IMO it's much more adventagious to use one of the established animation formats then building a new one just to create a fairly meager new capability.Pxtl wrote:What could make sense to me would be to simply keep the current system, but use bones in the place of parts. Moving the peewee's left arm is still moving the peewee's left arm, except that now you're moving the left-arm-bone. Only difference is now meshes can span multiple parts, and you use weighted vertices to make the animations smooth.
Part of the point of this is that I can't really animate in real time with the current system, I'm stuck doing very complicated animation script calculations manually. If I can animate in my modeling suite I can SEE my animations being applied to my model frame by frame live. It makes the process massively easier.
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SwiftSpear
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There is low cost animation tools available... also, spring units are usually fairly simple and don't need a wide array of animations, a moderate animator with proper tools could fully animate several units a day, compared with the current system which it takes days to give a simple unit a few animations.smoth wrote:.. most people cannot aford a complicated bones capable program.
Seriously, there is nothing wrong with the current implementation.
[edit] prosumably like most other spring features we've implimented the old system would still work, it would just be replaceable with the new system.
If we have a way to view / build animation code via BOS, like Servo (only not as buggy) we'd be just fine.
I don't want support for Max, ok? I'd be forced to pirate Max, as would every other halfway-honest person who wanted to do detailed animations. If we're talking about supporting, say, the MS3D format (Milkshape 3D, for the uninitiated)... well, that's something else again. MS3D comes with a great SDK, and it's a cheap piece of software... and it supports IK and animations.
But quite honestly, I like BOS just fine- it does a lot've things that are quite difficult to do with IK, and I think that Spring would be better off not going that route. We just need a better way to create/visualise content as it's being created.
I don't want support for Max, ok? I'd be forced to pirate Max, as would every other halfway-honest person who wanted to do detailed animations. If we're talking about supporting, say, the MS3D format (Milkshape 3D, for the uninitiated)... well, that's something else again. MS3D comes with a great SDK, and it's a cheap piece of software... and it supports IK and animations.
But quite honestly, I like BOS just fine- it does a lot've things that are quite difficult to do with IK, and I think that Spring would be better off not going that route. We just need a better way to create/visualise content as it's being created.
Swift, if you did a mod you would see it is not bad at all. There is a handy program called servo that I LOVE using for that. It is a bit buggy but it is a neat proggy once you learn it.SwiftSpear wrote: There is low cost animation tools available... also, spring units are usually fairly simple and don't need a wide array of animations, a moderate animator with proper tools could fully animate several units a day, compared with the current system which it takes days to give a simple unit a few animations.
Past that you can generate many anims in a way that is generic and then use a uniform naming convention. if you ever look at the gundam source you will see I have done this. Remember, it is always best to curtail redundancies :). when I update 1 anim I simply recompile all the scrips that use said anim. BOOM update.
