Spider Animations

[oDDity]

THought I'd make a separate thread for the spider anims, since they're obviously completely different from anything else in the game.

I've already built a pretty good animatable IK spider rig in maya, so I may as well do all the spider anims. There;s not that many anyway.

List I can think of -

Walk

Idle

Player spotted

Attack

Pain

Death - a fully animated death of the spider rolling on its back wth the legs curled in, like spiders all do. An articulated figure will not work here, since the spider's body would just drop to the ground with the legs all spawled out and would look stupid.

I'm not sure if we need a walk and a run, but even so the run can just be the walk played a little faster.

Here's the walk/run done anyway. If you aren't using firefox and want to see this at full speed you'll have to save it and play it in irfanview (or whatever image viewer you use)

IE and Opera slows all my gifs down to half speed for some reason.

 

[Springheel]

Looks quite good. What about animations to allow them to climb down walls or come down on threads like in D3? That would allow for some nice scripted events.

[oDDity]

I think that require more that just new animations. I saw tutorial threads on how to do it on the doom3world forums a while back. Maybe they could also spin webs and drop down from the ceiling on a string of silk. THat would be a surprise to the player if he's been making too much noise.

It would only be fair if their were indications of spiders in the area due to cobwebs, o the player knew to be careful.

[Ishtvan]

I think someone on d3world made a pretty substantial mod to make critters walk on walls a while back. It had to do with changing the direction of gravity for the AI. When we're ready, we could get it and see how it works.

[Domarius]

That's something I definetly want to see in our mod. No game I've played has really done justice how creepy spiders can be. A large part of it is scuttling in and out of cracks on the wall, and dropping down from the celing on a web.

[Darkness_Falls]

I assume it'd be easy to make critters walk on walls/ceilings because some creatures in Doom3 already do this in-game.

[Ishtvan]

I remember hearing that stuff was mostly scripted / in special cutscenes and not easy to reproduce. The "monsters on walls" mod tho made it easy for the mapper to set up that situation.

[Domarius]

Well I can confirm that from personal experience. In Doom 3, every spider you see that comes from a vent, drops down from the celing, or breaks out through a panel, stuff like that, is all a scripted sequence. Pretty much anything that isn't walking on floor and dodging left and right and attcking you, is a scripted sequence.

 

Yeah there was all that effort into that mod for just getting monsters to walk on walls. It may not have been easy, but they just may have done all the hard work for us

[oDDity]

 

 

[god_is_my_goldfish]

Once again, awesome work.

[Springheel]

Very cool! The top two look great. The jump looks a little low to me...makes the spider look really heavy. In T2, the spiders could jump right over your head. Or is that a pain response? I can't really tell.

[oDDity]

THE jump one is a kind of agitated movement when it spots the player, but if anyone has any ideas for these, don't be shy. THe THief spiders jump like this when they see you I think. I can easily make it go higher.

This is the pain, slower than reality so you can see it.

 

[oDDity]

[sparhawk]

Wow! Nice! I like the touch with the death animation where the limb is dropped.

[oDDity]

THe timing isn't quite right thoiugh,I'll have to fix that. Also I will do 3 or 4 death ones where a diffeent leg (or no leg) falls out, so they all won't look the same.

It would be pretty odd that every dead spider flops out the same leg.

Also the attack isn't aggressive enough, it should lunge forward a bit more viciously with the front legs.

[Springheel]

I'm still not sure about the jump. You may be right about what they did in T2, but it doesn't seem like a terribly realistic thing to do. Perhaps on spotting the player the spider scuttles backwards a step or two, like it is startled, and then rushes the player?

[Domarius]

Hey - you know how when spiders get scared, they rear up into attack position, like a snake does, with fangs bared and front legs raised - I can't think of a more chilling sight, I hate it. And then when they decide, they snap forward viciously.

 

Do you think we could have that?

[oDDity]

I'm not sure where an animation like that would be used.

These spiders are not scared of people, any more than a lion is scared of gazzelle. THey see people as prey.

Having them rear up like that is just going to give the player time to get away, or put an arrow in their belly. It's not as if you're going to stumble right on top of one by accident, you'll be seeing them from a distance, or they'll see you first and be running at you down a wall or something.

I was thinking to make the spider just come for the player straight away when they see him, and of course they should be a lot faster than the player as well, and can climb after him.

I think they should generally be a lot tougher than the Thief spiders.

THe size of these is the same as the big spider in 'shipping and recieving'

The baby Thief spiders were useless, they only did 1 damage and you could kill them in one hit.

[New Horizon]

I just had an image of this big ass spider coming out of a hole in the wall and then around 30 baby spiders come rushing out around her at full speed. Shudder.

[oDDity]

Yup, triggered scripted events could be used to great effect, as long as they're not overused like in Doom. Most of the Doom ones seemed too blatant and planned.

Spiders coming down walls, sliding down a web rope from the cieling right on top of the player, coming through cracks or holes, a spider that's caught a guard or something and is wrapping it up in silk to hang. I always think that's pretty creepy - a bunch of human bodies dangling upside down from the ceiling wrapped in silk.

(I see it quite often around here and it always makes me jump)

[Springheel]

That might be a cool prop to include in our 'cave pack'...a wrapped up corpse.

[sparhawk]

I think the small spiders make more sense when used in a pack if you want them to do some damage. But in dungeons and such they also serve as a kind of prop. Even though they don't do much damage they are an annoyance and you can't expect to see a big spider everywhere in place of a small spider.

[Corth]

hey oDD, in reply to your thread at cgtalk: file

 

there's a bunch of sliding too, I tried to quickly get it right, but you have some stationary legs when others are moving. This is a way around the problem you asked about though.

[oDDity]

Thanks. It's hard to keep track of 8 legs in a walk cycle :/ It's a lot easier to see the problem feet now that it's moving forward.

I'll see if this works as a cycle in doom.

What did you do exactly, so I can do it myself next time. ALso, how do you attach a curve to a bone so you can grb the curve instead of the bone. I managed to do it with the legs as you saw, I just parented the curve to the ik handle, but when I tried to attach a nurb circle to the root bone it wouldn't work. I try to do it by parenting, but maybe there's a better way, I tried using the connection editor as well with no success.

[oDDity]

I was looking at the animations for monster_demon_tick in the editor, nd there's a lot of good ones there I could try and copy, like the transition from wall to floor and coming up out of a hole.

IT's also noticible how long their walk cycle is, the trite moves 4 or 5 body lengths, rather than just one identical stride. It allows them to put a lot more charcater into it. I think I'll do that as well.

THe tick has six legs, but the principal is the same.