Domarius

Thanks for moving the topic If you were to animate a shakey old man getting up, or a person convulsing and falling over - these are extreme examples but plainly show how you can occupy all axiis on any body part with the smaller movements which you will also want to layer on a larger smoother movement. If you do that by tediously tweaking the smaller movements its not as easy to control the larger and takes a hundred times longer. I've been drawing for years and I apply the same principal to animating - rough out the basic form till it looks right, and then add details. So I don't need instruction on that. I think it's gone as far as it can go. I mainly wanted to make sure people are aware of this and don't discard an important innovation in animating when we optimise our export process.

Well nice to know I was assumed to be the former... I assure you I'm the latter. The whole reason I like them is because it reduces the number of keys I use in total. Such as tweaking the pose for the dureation of the entire animation simply by placing keyframes on the first frame on a new layer. Layers let you split up movements into what they are - layers of movement.

Well, using layers to stay away from that time-consuming "stop motion animation" situation is essential (now that the option exists), which was really my main point from the beginning - possibly not worded very explicitly. The animators where I work feel the same - we say "you can't do without layers" in the same way one might say "you can't do without a phone" - there was a time when people got along without them, but to avoid them now would mean being left behind.

@squill - that page mentioned Trax and said it was difficult to use, which is why he made the plugin. The plugin seems pretty straight forward to me, I'll happily use it if it works the way it says on the web page. @oDDity - I find your example hard to believe - lots of small movements can occupy all axiis, leaving none free for the larger ones. I was exaggerating when I said layers are essential - what I mean is, they avoid you getting trapped in "stop motion animation" where you're modifying several key frames to achieve some larger movement. So basically there's a hard way and an easier and much quicker way of getting the same result. n true oDDity fashion - the hard way is the 'elite' way, and the easy way is the 'noob' way, for no other reason than the principal of "harder is better". I don't agree I think easier and quicker is called "innovation". But suit yourself. Fortunately I don't need to convince you, if this plugin does what it says it should.

But - using the same shaking fist example - when someone shakes their fist vigirously, their whole body shakes in response. That's keyframes on the hips and upper torso. Now I want to have the guy gradually leaning into the pose while shaking, because he stepped in and of course, doesn't suddenly stop. This is an overlayed motion of the hips and shoulders moving over a distance while shaking. How do you do this without layers and keep the overlayed motion seperate from the shaking? With layers I just add that motion on a new layer with a couple of key frames. If I decide he's moving too fast, too slow, not curvy enough, etc. I just have to tweak a couple of key frames. With only one layer, you'd have to shift each and every shake keyframe to create that overlayed motion, and it'd never be as smooth, and making changes would take forever. No doubt this affects the quality of your work as you'd spend too much time on doing this sort of change and lose time to make more important changes. It's just old fashioned. IK and FK has nothing to do with it, and I use both when I animate, depending on what I need.

@oDDity - when I discovered the layers feature of MotionBuilder and asked you about it, you didn't know what it was really for, which is why I made the annendium to your video in the Wiki. It's been a year since then and I've learned a lot. http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/...uilder_tutorial You could explain how I can achieve the same effect with curves, that would be more helpful than your usual mysterious and patronising comments. Until then - @squill & oDDity - If you want to layer on an overall motion that happens to use existing axiis as the many smaller motions, without layers you won't be able to easily adjust that overall motion, you'll have to edit all the keyframes of the individual smaller motions - takes longer, harder to get a smooth result, end of story. It's like once upon a time they didn't "need" splines, or even tweening, but things called innovation happened along the way and let us to better work, in shorter amounts of time. I'd like to believe you, but where are these controls and how are they used to get the same effect? I said movement cycles - walk, run, search, even with varieties, don't make up of most of the animations. And even they can benefit from using layers, I used them to make adjustments to the overall pose of the search cycle without editing every single keyframe... I'm going to give the Maya layers plugin a fiddle this weekend hopefully. I would certainly like to see the workflow optimised, and if this layers plugin is everything the web page says it is, then it is the only reason I've been using MotionBuilder and if it was ditched it would drastically cut down development time and possible complications with changing the rig.

This is only a relevant example if you think I'm using "too many keyframes", and that layers are just for "keeping track of all your keyframes" which they're not. Yeah but your major animations here have all been movement cycles. You should really be replying to my recent post, you missed it. I'd love to take this discussion out to a place with reputable animators and have them tell you both exactly what I've been saying in the previous posts, but it doesn't matter as long as this Maya plugin works...

@oDDity - the rest of the world has caught up (3DS Max, Motion Builder etc.) and Maya is the only one still left behind, and you can find posts on the net supporting this. Maya has Trax to try and alleviate this but it's needlessly complex. All the guys at work animate in 3DS. Your example tells me you aren't sure what I'm talking about. If you want to quickly animate smaller movements also making a larger movement over time, (eg a shaky old man standing up), you need layers, end of story. A single timeline might be fine for mechanical motions like a walk cycle - but organic, expressive actions are are layered movements. When someone shakes their fist violently, it's not just their fist that shakes - their whole body shakes in response. So that's keyframes on at least the shoulder bone, upper torso bone, and waist bone. But they don't stand rigid on the spot while this happens - the whole body moves over time - their weight is still shifting to keep balance, as they are still moving forward slightly from the lean in they gave for dramatic effect. That's a new layer, with keyframes on at least the hips and upper torso. Anyway, if you guys end up cleaning up the export process, I'd be willing to try out this plugin they made for Maya, to hack in layers. Lets you save them too, which is nice... as for compatibility - if you have the plugin you see the layers, otherwise you don't. And of course you flatten them to one layer before exporting. http://en.9jcg.com/comm_pages/blog_content-art-71.htm I just want to know that I can still access useful Keyframe controls, like select a bunch, pan them about, and compress the amount of time they take. Apparently it still uses the main Maya timeline, so if maya has good keyframe editing controls, it should all be good... time will tell.

Well the elevator works by a combination of magic and steam, so we can easily define its limiting characteristics in a scientific manner I'd say it's going to be a basic elevator like in every other game. You press a button, it goes to that floor.

There's no point me doing any new animations till you guys sort this out. And before we "cut motion builder out of the pipeline", I'd like to see anyone try to do something with as many layers of movement as the warm hands anim and get something looking just as natural. Complicated organic motions are just easier with layered movement, without it some things are practically impossible. I won't animate in Maya if I can't layer the movement keyframes. Consider the angry shaking fist example - the fist shakes violently back and forth on all axiis, using several keyframes to go back and forth. Now you want the fist to slowly move up or side to side over time, because nothing stays perfectly the same over time. Do you go and slightly adjust every single "shake fist" keyframe till it moves slowly in one direction? No fucking way - that's going back to the days of stop motion animation, will take just as long to do, and you'll never get a smooth organic result. Instead, make a new layer with a few side to side keyframes, that gently sway the whole fist (shaking and all) smoothly side to side over time. Done.

It's cool - this is probably not worth the time but the sneer looks a bit artificial somehow, like it's simply stretched. Don't rule out ever seeing specialised anims, that's something I want to work towards.

Shit Can't wait to get Force Unleashed.

I used to animate in body part mode, but then one of the rig revisions changed the way IK worked. Previously, if I moved say, the upper back joint, the arms and head would follow exactly, being children. But with the latest rig (not oDDity's, the one we are still using), the arms and head get "left behind" instead, (and he does this african-american lady "cobra" thing "mmmhmm?") which makes it impossible to do realistic movement. So instead I switch to Full Body mode, to get the same effect.

Having 3 fingers is no problem - it's just the spastic behaviour I always get from hands when I'm animating them. Rotating the joints don't do what you think they will - they stretch the fingers out in really demented positions, and you keep randomly adjusting the joints till they sort of mush into an acceptable shape - HUGE waste of time. And on top of that, the left hand fingers randomly decide to rotate in circles during animating, even though no key frames get set on them. Well technically they do, when animating in full body mode, but nothing is moved. But I solve it by constantly deleting the keyframes from the hands after keying things in full body mode.

If this only happens during the idle pose, and looks fine other times, wouldn't this be a rigging issue?

@squill - that anim is just the walk from the mocap library oDDity uploaded to the FTP, it was just an example. @oDDity - it's been hell animating the hands all this time!! I really hope your change helps, I'll be very appreciative. Of course I'll have to re-do the hand anims (eg. warm hands by fire) since I had to basically "hack" them to work (bending things in ways that didn't make sense but ended up looking right) but if it actually works properly from now on I won't care.

Reminds me of the huge huge stairwell in harry potter, with the moving stairs.

Fantastic - so many good tweaks for variety.

Yeah there was an opportunity for "Aliens" type sequences with those spider monsters crawling in along the hallways from all directions, but the game didn't support that, so apart from the occasional scripted entry sequence, they just walked along the ground like every other monster.

...and you base this on all your experience working in a full time game development job.

Actually it was a SNES game as far as I was concerned I think the SNES version was the best of all of the versions, having the best graphics and sound hardware of any platform at the time. It had digital music (like MOD music) and the music was so catchy and is still awesome to me today. I should give Spliter Cell co-op a go.

SWAT teams use it. And it is in a game - SWAT and all it's sequels Personally I think it's stretching it a bit, it's hard enough as it is to imagine a thief nimbly skitting around with all this gear on him, but whatever.

The hair suits him very well.

Yeah this would just be making some sort of table of categorised statements and responses for each voice type. This isn't implemented yet, I'm sure even I would have heard about it by now. The categories themselves are nothing more than a name, it doesn't serve any purpose but to cluster statements and responses together. Eg: peasant's table could look like this; Superior Statements -Good evening m'lord. -(etc.) Responses -Sorry m'lord, I'll be out of your way. -(etc) Insult Statements -You smell like a mangy dog! -(etc) Responses -I'll take you on! -(etc) Ah... of course this raises the issue of the game knowing who's superior and whos' inferior to each other. And then coming up with different responses for each situation... Maybe we could design around this by only having equal level people interact in a variety of ways, and differing classes are limited to greetings only.

Lost Vikings, by Interplay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Vikings A true classic, best co-op / real-time / puzzle game ever. It was 2 player.