animation NPC animations blending

[Arcturus]

While I was trying to fix the 'turning' animations, I experimented with different values in tdm_ai_base.script file. Here's what it looks like when blending between animations is set to 24 frames. I

I replaced all values in the file wholesale.

[datiswous]

How/what was it previously? I don't know what I'm supposed to see.

Edit: Could it be that the change from one animation to the other (in this case a reaction on an attack) is less abrupt because it is slower?

Edited October 6, 2025 by datiswous

[Arcturus]

All consecutive animations get blended together. You can change duration of transition in frames. It's the number after comma. For example:

animState( ANIMCHANNEL_LEGS, "Legs_TurnLeft", 18 );

There are hundreds of those and changing some of them may break things of course. E.g. combat animations. Although at "18" combat seems to work.

Here's a slightly lower number (18 frames).

The randomly played idle animations are blended a lot more smoothly while NPCs walk too. Also the random head and shoulder turns that are driven by code.

 

[Arcturus]

This is what transition from run to walk looks like with current values. It's strange, because path corners are in the middle but he stops running pretty early.

 

[datiswous]

Yep. I got used to this in missions, but seeing it here it does look weird.

[Arcturus]

"path_anim" has those two properties:

blend_in

blend_out

"path_cycleanim" has by default blend_in property. In both cases they don't seem to be doing anything.

By changing values in tdm_ai_base.script one can change transitions from e.g. walk to run, but is there a way to control transitions between idle animations at all?

[Arcturus]

How about we increase blending for walk, run and idle animations and see what happens?

[Amadeus]

9 hours ago, Arcturus said:

How about we increase blending for walk, run and idle animations and see what happens?

I think that's a great idea. The blend frames set to 18 look very good

[Arcturus]

Turns out I was a bit lucky when I did that previous video. Run to walk with high blending doesn't always look good. It depends how well walk cycles are synchronized. Here you can see that feet are sliding during transition from run to walk:

NPCs don't normally transition from run straight to walk. I set it up that way with path nodes, but usually run animations transition to idle.

Another issue is that you can't do separate blending for run to walk and idle to walk. Idle to walk at 4 (current value):

At very high values there's some feet sliding:

I like acceleration and deceleration but 18 frames are probably too high anyway.

It's possible to have different values for legs and torso channels.

[Arcturus]

This idea is slowly falling apart. When idle blending is set to some number, blending begins when idle animation kicks in. Which means that NPC runs, reaches its goal and only when idle animation starts playing, the running animation begins to fade. Problem is, origin movement is baked into the running animation. So the moving origin joint is blending with stationary origin from the idle animation. Result is a character is stopping further then it should.

When blending is at the start of the running animation then that doesn't seem to cause problems.

Even the current value of 4 seems to affect how far the NPC travels. When blending is set to zero:

Blending animations on the torso channel shouldn't cause those problems, since it won't affect the origin's location.

[datiswous]

1 hour ago, Arcturus said:

Result is a character is stopping further then it should.

I think the character shouldn't stop so abrupt. That is normaly not possible. It looks best on the second video (inactive mengen = 18).

[Arcturus]

Yes, the "ease out" looks good, but if the character always stops two feet too far than it's supposed to, it will cause issues.

24 minutes ago, datiswous said:

inactive mengen

That's Youtube's automatic translation, lol.