Home Forums Education, Training and Jobs Animation Warping Videos

Viewing 17 reply threads
  • Author
    Posts
    • #5517
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Some vids of the animation warping I’ve been developing for my masters.

      Take a straight forward walk animation, a pose and put them together and have it all make sense, not as straightforward as you might think (but then, more straighforward that you might think at the same time – I think :? )

      http://www.skynet.ie/~masochst/Animations/

      The Darragh_Walk.wmv is a compliation of all the clips.

      Could develop it more and make it better – but have to call a halt to programming and write up my thesis.

    • #33082
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Oh, you need to right click and save as to get the vids.

    • #33083
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Don’t mean to sully your work, but isn’t that animation blending ?

    • #33084
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Nope, its not. Animation blending is different. Doing a straight blend with an animation and a pose doesn’t give a result that’s any way useable. There’s a little bit of timewarping going on there, as well as some filtering.

    • #33085
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Doing a straight blend with an animation and a pose doesn’t give a result that’s any way useable.[/quote:5618642faf]
      I think you’ll find that every single game on the market contract that statement.

    • #33086
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      heh?

    • #33087
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Anim blending…its what every game uses to go from one state to another.

    • #33088
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Yes, but they generally blend 2 (or more) animations. I’m blending an animation with a pose. Doing a straight blend will cause the pose to subtract from the motion of the animation.

    • #33089
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Surely a pose is simply a single frame animation?
      Whats the difference?

    • #33091
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Yeah – it is. The difference, as far as I know, is when doing a blend of 2 animations, its normally because the character wants to change from his walk (for example) to a crouch, and so you overlap the end of the walk motion with the start of hte crouch motion, and blend the 2 of them.
      This means you need to have a crouch animation to blend to. The blend will involve adding x of the walk with y of the crouch.

      The pose doesn’t contain any motion, being just one frame. So blending with a pose will restrict the motion of the character around the point in time it meets the pose – this gives a lot of footskate and other unwanted artifacts.

      So instead, there’s a warp going in the animation vid’s posted, to keep the motion from the walk while also incorporating the pose.

      Although – thinking about it, it does have a lot in common with a blend.

    • #33096
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Looks very good. Well done.

      Isn’t animation blending used to “blend” one animation into another one. ie: A walk cycle into a run cycle.
      This is more mixing an animation with a pose. The 1st animation is still playing, it just incorporates certain parts of the pose animation(although its not really an animation). I don’t think that is necessarily the same as blending, where one animation fades out and into a another.

      Basically, it means you don’t have to create a walk cycle, and a walk while holding out arms cycle, and a walk while crouching cycle. You just create the walk cycle and then various poses that can be made while walking.

      I think its pretty cool and would save a good bit of work!

    • #33097
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Thanks!

    • #33099
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Okay I see what you’re doing :)

      Is it using much processing to handle this?

      It’d be a case of whether the processing cost is more expensive than the extra anim information to see if this is real world useable.

    • #33100
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      At the minute, yeah, its too slow for real time. I really have to get into the detail of exactly what’s going on in my code. I have the impression that most of it can be removed with very little difference being made to the animation, resulting in something very quick that could possibly be used at real time.

      However, making an animation in real time does pose some problems in itself, which I haven’t spent much time on.

    • #33102
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      It’ll be an interesting demo to talk about anyway :)

      Might be nice to find yourself a willing artist to create you a model to hang on those bones to make the video even more inpressive…after the thesis…

    • #33103
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Unforunately, the engine its based on, is a few builds out of date, and there’s a lot involved updating, so putting a mesh on is a bit awkward. Besides, its not really necessary to show off my work – it’d just look better. Its something I have in mind though.

    • #33106
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Yeah, I mean for showing off when you’re looking for jobs. I wouldn’t worry about it in the short term. While a coder would see that and know what it is, looking at it at interview stage might look a little lazy and you didn’t get a skinned model in…

    • #33372
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Improved versions of those animations are up at
      http://www.skynet.ie/~masochst/BetterAnimations/

      I’ve managed to remove the footskate without using IK.

      The ‘sad_walk’ is new, making a sad kind of walk by only having to define a pose.

Viewing 17 reply threads
  • The forum ‘Education, Training and Jobs’ is closed to new topics and replies.