Thief Player Animations

[Ishtvan]

Yeah, we could definitely use some programming help on the actual mod. I'm not gonna be able to do much of anything until after Dec 20th due to a lab walkthrough by the higher-ups, then I go away for x-mas so it's more like after x-mas.

 

@AscottK: The current lean code was done by SZ, and AFAIK it bends the player at the waist rather than play an animation. We want to play an animation, we just didn't have any at the time. I don't know if the camera motion is decoupled from this 3rd person joint bending or not, I'd have to look at it. If the camera is decoupled, then it would be easy to add in the animation and just alter the camera change angle until it matches the animation. If it's coupled to the bending of the joint of the 3rd person model though, that's going to be a bit more of a hassle to update.

[Ishtvan]

I did some testing and it looks like the 3rd person model is decoupled from the first person lean camera, and is not used for any physical testing or anything. Therefore it should be pretty easy to comment that part out and play a lean animation instead. Only problem is that it's easier to play an animation from scripting than from the SDK.

 

That's why a lot of the other actions like jump, crouch, etc are handled via scripts in addition to the SDK. We might have to do something similar for leaning, where it sets a boolean variable STATE_LEAN or something, the player.script reads that and does the lean animation.

[Ishtvan]

Btw, I don't know if this helps or not with the thief player anim problems, but it looks like the IK for the Thief is a bit screwy:

 

Try loading up seventh.map and standing on the sink in front of the mirror, you'll see that when standing on ledges, our thief has his head up his ass, literally. The player had IK active, so I guess our thief has IK active by default too, but probably with the wrong values (the ones that made sense for the D3 marine rig/model).

[ascottk]

I did some testing and it looks like the 3rd person model is decoupled from the first person lean camera, and is not used for any physical testing or anything. Therefore it should be pretty easy to comment that part out and play a lean animation instead. Only problem is that it's easier to play an animation from scripting than from the SDK.

I'm not sure what you're saying about the scripting

 

Btw, I don't know if this helps or not with the thief player anim problems, but it looks like the IK for the Thief is a bit screwy:

 

Try loading up seventh.map and standing on the sink in front of the mirror, you'll see that when standing on ledges, our thief has his head up his ass, literally. The player had IK active, so I guess our thief has IK active by default too, but probably with the wrong values (the ones that made sense for the D3 marine rig/model).

I'll take a look but I didn't see anything about IK being activated in the def file. There's values you can add to def files like enable walk_ik or something (can't find the info on that but I did run across it at some point).

[Ishtvan]

I'm not sure what you're saying about the scripting

That's okay, it's more of a concern for the programmers to worry about. Basically all the other player actions like crouch, creep, run, jump, etc, are checked in this player script to play the correct animation. Lean was never set up this way, since it was done before by tilting or "animating" the model directly from the SDK. Now that we have a lean animation, we want to comment out the tilting part in the SDK, and add lean to that player actions script (along with crouch, jump, etc) so that it can play a lean animation that we would define in the def file like the others.

 

I'll take a look but I didn't see anything about IK being activated in the def file. There's values you can add to def files like enable walk_ik or something (can't find the info on that but I did run across it at some point).

The IK for both the ai thief and the player definitely looks active. The legs move around if you stand on a ledge, and they seem to move to the wrong places, making me think maybe the IK is screwy which is why the legs are twisting all over when walking too.

[ascottk]

That's okay, it's more of a concern for the programmers to worry about. Basically all the other player actions like crouch, creep, run, jump, etc, are checked in this player script to play the correct animation. Lean was never set up this way, since it was done before by tilting or "animating" the model directly from the SDK. Now that we have a lean animation, we want to comment out the tilting part in the SDK, and add lean to that player actions script (along with crouch, jump, etc) so that it can play a lean animation that we would define in the def file like the others.

Sounds good.

 

The IK for both the ai thief and the player definitely looks active. The legs move around if you stand on a ledge, and they seem to move to the wrong places, making me think maybe the IK is screwy which is why the legs are twisting all over when walking too.

Currently the torso isn't animating either. The ik defs probably are not referencing the correct joints. I have to look into that.

[ascottk]

I have to look into the ik stuff in more detail. Either something's not right with the thief skeleton (like the hierarchies) or I'm not using ik correctly. I managed to turn the thief 90 degrees to the right after playing around with the ik assignments.

[Ishtvan]

I don't think we've ever done a working IK setup for any of our new characters (unless you did one for the guards recently that I missed), so it's probably new and frightening territory. There's a description of IK on the iddevnet site.

[ascottk]

I don't think we've ever done a working IK setup for any of our new characters (unless you did one for the guards recently that I missed), so it's probably new and frightening territory. There's a description of IK on the iddevnet site.

Yup, it's a description all right, a pathetic description

[Ishtvan]

If we just want to get something working and test the anims for now, we could probably disable IK like on the other AI. Otherwise it will be an exciting journey into new territory.

[ascottk]

If we just want to get something working and test the anims for now, we could probably disable IK like on the other AI. Otherwise it will be an exciting journey into new territory.

I had the ik set up for most of the AI but I don't know why the ik was screwing up the thief. I commented out the ik on the thief player & AI & now the models no longer distort.

[Springheel]

Strange....

 

I had the ik set up for most of the AI

 

There must still be something extra to be done to the IK with the other characters, because they don't walk up stairs properly.