Newb Anim Thread

[Domarius]

Just saying ... I have little time at the moment but I can still help more effectively if I know posts in the animation thread are defiently going to be about animation.

[Baddcog]

OK, back to this tyhread after a long hiatus.

 

@Domarius, this IS about animating

 

Working on the rats anims. Got some decent anims, a few idles, and a walk.

 

Actually quite happy with the walk after redoing it several times. I ended up having to cut his walk distance in half of what I started with cause his legs are short. So it looks good now. But he moves across floor VERY slow. So I cut the animation time in half, his feet still walk across floor correctly, just twice as fast and his origin covers the same amount of ground in half the time.

 

But he's still slow, the anim is only 20 frames and I can't squeeze it anymore as I have keyframes on every frame now.

 

So how can I make him walk at a decent speed? If I make him cover more ground it's gonna be real hard to make his feet work right. I realize he's a rat and maybe shouldn't move as quick as a human but this is too slow.

 

Do you guys have a formula for units moved X frames in anim or something?

[Domarius]

OK, back to this tyhread after a long hiatus.

 

@Domarius, this IS about animating

Of course I was talking about the posts the others guys made, not yours.

 

Working on the rats anims. Got some decent anims, a few idles, and a walk.

 

Actually quite happy with the walk after redoing it several times. I ended up having to cut his walk distance in half of what I started with cause his legs are short. So it looks good now. But he moves across floor VERY slow. So I cut the animation time in half, his feet still walk across floor correctly, just twice as fast and his origin covers the same amount of ground in half the time.

 

...

 

So how can I make him walk at a decent speed? If I make him cover more ground it's gonna be real hard to make his feet work right. I realize he's a rat and maybe shouldn't move as quick as a human but this is too slow.

In real life, rats are a blur, they dart from point to point, you see their feet scurrying along but not in enough detail to see exactly how it contacts the ground. Unless they haven't spotted you yet and are sniffing around. Don't know how well we can replicate this behaviour but if we can, it may make focusing so much on the detail of the walk cycle pretty redundant.

 

But he's still slow, the anim is only 20 frames and I can't squeeze it anymore as I have keyframes on every frame now.

This is easy, just go to the timeline, bottom right hand side of the screen, where the "snapping" dropdown box is, and change it to "No snapping" Now you can add in as many detailed frames as you want, and yes this will still hugely affect the final result, even though techincally the animation only runs at 25 fps or whatever it is. For example when I animated the guard shaking his fist violently, it was very robotic and slow with a keyframe on every frame. But i turned snappng off, compressed the duration of the shake (the keyframes became more closely packed) and you can still see him shaking his fist fast in the final anim.

[Baddcog]

Yeah, he is so small that you can barely see the small nuances(?) that I put into him oh well, it's good practice if nothing else.

 

I'm gonna have to redo it anyway since I forgot about not moving the origin bone up/down. I went in and changed it's name and attached it to another bone I named origin. It works fin in max but in game that bone (groove_bone) doesn't seem to wanna work, so he doesn't bob up and down in game, also he has a strange 10 degree tilt to one side.

 

I'll probably just try and do another 20 frame anim, make him move twice as far, make 4 steps instead of 2 and not worry about it looking to good. Wanna get onto another bot instead of killing too much time with the rat.

 

Thanks.

[squill]

i don't think you need that much keyframes, with a few well placed keys you could get a most of your movements right. Could you otherwise post a viewport render of your anims to make it easier for us to give feedback.

[Baddcog]

Well, I've had a hard time finding somewhere to host movie files, but I just uploaded the anims. unfortunately the up/down of his cycle is currently broken and he has a strange tilt to one side because of it.

 

Still, if you place him in a map and let him see you he will walk towards you.

 

-Edit-fixed missing editor model