motion capture

[Arcturus]

I'm testing UE5's motion capture tools. For this test I recorded myself with just a single camera, no markers. It took quite a lot of manual work to clean it up. As you can see it's still far from perfect. Feet, hands, shoulder pads need manual adjustments. It's possible to combine inverse kinematics chains (IK) in legs and hands with mocap, that's why feet are nicely glued to the floor in the video. There's a small jitter when looking up close that's not in the original animation. You can see it in some other Darkmod animations, probably some math inaccuracy.

edit: uploaded longer video

[Arcturus]

Jerkiness in game can be mitigated by smoothing up animation curves in Blender before exporting.

There's one potential obstacle if we're to replace current idle animations. All idle animations, and by extension some other too, start and end with the same pose. It's especially important that feet are in the same position. There is quick 3 frame transition (interpolation), but if poses aren't matching it looks bad.

The thing is, I don't like current default idle pose. It's supposed to be relaxed, with one leg back, but in my opinion it's imbalanced and unnatural. Left upper leg is twisted too much. I think it should be neutral, symmetrical and short. Then you can easily make longer animations where character shifts weight to one leg or the other, like in the video above. Symmetrical pose makes mirrored animations easier, such as turn left/right could simply be flipped.

Other, bigger issue is the fact that first frame of the idle animation is used as a default pose in Dark Radiant. To me t-pose would make more sense. If mapper attached something to an NPC using bindtojoint and the animation changes, that means that such object will be misaligned now. That misalignment wouldn't be game breaking, but may look bad.

A compromise would be to leave upper body as is, change only legs and hope that mappers didn't attach anything to leg joints using 'bindtojoint'. Cause as I understand this is not an issue with the Def_Attach method?

https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Attaching_Props_to_AI

Edit: feet should be slightly rotated, this is just a quick example, not final.

[The Black Arrow]

This is very cool even as a simple test, always loved Motion Capture and I know that good ol' Thief did it as well, it explains why the animations looked great even for a game made in the 1990's

These animations are great and rather smooth, but you can tell some of them are a bit "quirky", such as at 1:21, the sneeze looks more like somebody is looking at his hand while he got sudden back pain 

[Arcturus]

@The Black Arrow Final in-game animations would be more polished.

[Arcturus]

A walk-cycle. Takes some work to take a bit of motion capture and make it loop

 

[The Black Arrow]

13 hours ago, Arcturus said:

A walk-cycle. Takes some work to take a bit of motion capture and make it loop

 

"Where are ya...Ye, taffer?!"
"Come on out now...Ya taffer!"
"Come to Papa, now!"

I have a good feeling that this being well polished would make it look great, a lot better than the simple "sword in hand, walk like you don't care" it currently has.

[Arcturus]

I was thinking about replacing search.md5anim but now I see that it's much faster.

 

[Bikerdude]

Might have to adjust the movement of the right foot, there is some weird jitter right before its lifted off the floor. That and the old mans crotch area looks like like he is packin lol.

[Arcturus]

@Bikerdude If it meeds to match the speed then we can't use it anyway.

[chakkman]

This is fantastic. Hope some of this will end up in the core game. Huge improvement.

[Arcturus]

Legs have to be completely animated by hand in order to prevent them from sliding, with mocap serving as a guideline.

[Arcturus]

I added this walkcycle to repository as "walk_sneaking".

BTW, why are animations played in slow-motion in Dark Radiant?