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Akerfeldt
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Post by Akerfeldt »

Phasmatis wrote:BTW you realise most games nower days have good animation because it's motion captured not animated by hand.
True but motion capture is only a tiny part of it. The much more significant factor, IMO, is the engine and its capabilities: animation blending, attaching stuff to joints, ragdoll and other physics, and being able to manipulate bones/joints in code among other things. IMO, DX is already mocap quality animation, the animations just appear awkward because of the engine... and they couldn't find anyone who knew how to dance ;). One of the problems is that the models are extremely low poly count, hence the mittens instead of fingers, and because of that you never see anyone pull a trigger. Another problem is that without skeletal animation, there's very little you can do in code to make the animation look more realistic. In DX they literally have a strafe-shooting animation in addition to running forward and shooting animation whereas in an game with skeletal animation (CS for example) the torso moves independently of the lower body, so you get the toon looking at what they are shooting in addition to their feeting moving in the direction of motion. In DX, someone is either running toward you or perpendicular to you. And in DXMP it just looks like they are running toward you no matter what. The death animations look as good as they could possibly be in UE1, I mean, if you shoot someone from the back, they fall forward, if you shoot them from the front, they fall backward. Maybe they could have made a few different animations for each scenario and randomized it, but that's hardly an improvement. It's certainly not worth the effort at any rate.

So really the problem isn't just mocap, it's the engine. Assassins Creed is a prime example of what an engine can do, think about how much AC's animation is due to code vs just motion capture.
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Post by Hashi »

So will you need the program run again? The most recent qeue that was made available is empty, will you need it again?
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Post by Akerfeldt »

Hashi wrote:So will you need the program run again?
No, that is all.
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Post by Jujixi »

I agree it is usually down to the engine. The Euphoria engine from NaturalMotion (think Gta4 character animation and u get the idea) has no keyframed or mocapped animation in it, everything you see a character do in real time is coded then relayed to a bone/muscle structure. Something like that would be nice to see in DX3 rather than the random physics from DX2 which sometimes looked nice but often confused me, especially headshots with the sniper rifle making people's bodys do backflips.

Jonas wrote:Clearly it's time to get a hold of some mocap equipment.

Any suggestions?

;)
My Uni actually has a MoCap studio lol. tho i doubt they'll let me use it for non Uni stuff they do have loads of pre-recorded and cleaned up data they often lend to students.
Of course the data they give will have to be translated to whatever rig the characters have and then adjusted to fit their size and then tweaked again to make it suit the needed animation so it's probably easier just keyframing it by hand, which usually gives just as convincing a look most of the time.
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Post by Dead-eye »

Phasmatis wrote:
Dead-eye wrote:But it seems to me that if you can rig a character then animating it should not be that hard...
I don't like comments like this. If it wasn't hard to do, any old modeller would be able to do it. It isn't easy, you have to know what muscles move when you walk and it isn't just the legs and arms, it's the shoulders, head, neck, pelvis, upper spine etc etc a lot of micro movement is involved, which is difficult.

BTW you realise most games nower days have good animation because it's motion captured not animated by hand.
I might have made that remark a bit hasty. Making good looking animation is no easy task even with bones however it's still far easier to animate a rigged character then a non rigged character. What I was wondering is where to problem lies. Is it that the animators need to animate the characters without rigs? Or is it that the animators are "not trained" at animating rigged characters? Both cases are understandable.

It's just that both seem to have diffrent solutions. If its that you guys can't animate the characters because if you rige them then you can't export to Deus Ex, than it makes sense to use the character animations from the game. If it that no one on the team is trained in making good looking animations for character, then that seems to require a diffrent solution.

I'm just trying to understand the situation.
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Post by metche_steele »

It's the sheer enormity of the problem.

Yes it's doable but it requires someone trained to sit there and do the massive batch of animation frame by frame.

If the animator needs to adjust the model slightly or the texture then all previous animation work on said model has to be redone from scratch.

It's an incredibly laborious and painful procedure.

That is why Darren's automated animator tool of greatness is an absolute blessing as it requires little to no human intervention!
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Post by DDL »

Plus good rigging is just really really time consuming.

And a rigging setup is dependent on the animations you're planning on using: a model rigged for a DX animation set will not seamlessly accept a new animation scheme: even if the bones are happily in agreement, you might get mesh tearing or other jarring inconsistencies purely because the rigging was not set up with the new animations in mind.

RE: Mocap vs code, it depends on what you're talking about.
If you're talking purely pre-generated animations (walking, running, shooting), then mocap all the way: there is an indefinable quality to ACTUAL human movement that we're nowhere near to replicating de novo.
Thus you either try and do it manually and get something that's 'good enough' if you're lucky (and something that's deeply unsettling if you're not), or you mocap it and get something that's perfect (because it IS, after all, actual human movement).

However, if you're talking about emergent animation (reactions to falling, being shot, punched, all the horrors we inflict on virtual characters), then code counts for so much more. You cannot mocap someone reacting to being shot from every conceivable angle, but you can model the elasticity of the various joints and muscles and make them react accordingly.
Ragdolls are perhaps the best example of this, since basically by definition they have no pre-generated animations. And ragdolls can look very very good, but can also look oh so very wrong.


So yeah, in this case (improving DX animations) we'd really be looking at mocap, since there's nowhere near the capability needed in that poor engine to handle any of the latter stuff.

But hey, it's all hypothetical anyway, right? :)
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Post by Jonas »

I know a mate whose university has a mocap studio too, but he's not allowed to use it except for university work either :(
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Post by Dead-eye »

metche_steele wrote:It's the sheer enormity of the problem.

Yes it's doable but it requires someone trained to sit there and do the massive batch of animation frame by frame.

If the animator needs to adjust the model slightly or the texture then all previous animation work on said model has to be redone from scratch.

It's an incredibly laborious and painful procedure.

That is why Darren's automated animator tool of greatness is an absolute blessing as it requires little to no human intervention!
I could see that.

I know vary little about animation, even less about character animation. The most my animation skills aspire to is if you said you change the animation curve of a line by effecting the tangent. I would have some idea what your talking about.

However I do know that you don't animate every key frame , only the "key" animations then you mess around with the tangent of the key frame. Hope that helps, I'm still learning.
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Post by Jonas »

Dead-eye, you just admitted you know nothing about animating and you specifically have no idea about animating for Deus Ex, so why even try to provide advice to people like Phasmatis, who's been animating for 8-10 years?
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Post by Akerfeldt »

Didn't they mocap the ps2 version?
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Post by Jonas »

Yep, I believe they did.
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Post by Dead-eye »

Jonas wrote:Dead-eye, you just admitted you know nothing about animating and you specifically have no idea about animating for Deus Ex, so why even try to provide advice to people like Phasmatis, who's been animating for 8-10 years?
ouch.
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Post by Jonas »

It's not meant as a burn, I just don't understand the reasoning behind it. I mean you don't see me telling Shane or Nick how UnrealScript works ;)
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Post by Dead-eye »

Jonas wrote:It's not meant as a burn, I just don't understand the reasoning behind it. I mean you don't see me telling Shane or Nick how UnrealScript works ;)
I wasn't going to add that comment but this quot made me feel inclined to add it.
metche_steele wrote:It's the sheer enormity of the problem.

Yes it's doable but it requires someone trained to sit there and do the massive batch of animation frame by frame.
The frame by frame part is the thing that got to me. I'm not trying to say that animation is an easy task or that the team members on the team don't know how to animate it's just that I'm trying to understand the situation to see if there is something that I know that could help.

I know that when I first started learning animation that it seemed to me that it was an imposable time consuming task because at first animations don't seem to do what you won't them to do. This will course people new to animation, like myself, to set an overly large amount of animations keys so that the object is in the exact placement that the user won't it to be in. Under this method it will become imposable to edit in the future and will take an overly large amount of time and energy. Not to mention it's the incorrect way of animating just about anything.

The correct way is to set the "key" key frames then change the way the line or equation that connects the key frames interact.

For example I will use this tutorial that I did.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp4f-4C3TLc

The tutorial can be found here at 3d buzz for free under 3ds max: http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_home.php

In this tutorial we set each key frame where the ball hits the ground along the X-axis and Z-axis. Then we went back and set each frame were the ball is up in the air along the Z-axis. In total we set about 9 key frames.

Here is what the Ipo curve editor looked like at this point:
Image
The Blue line shows the the change in Z, Red is X, and the green is Y all over time.

See how the change in Z over time is smooth for line in between keys? By default 3ds Max, and every other program I believe, sets all curves to smooth. For a bouncing ball that would look all wrong. The ball in mid air will start slow then speed up and then slow down before hitting the ground.

In order to fix that we change the tangent handles of the ball in the IPO curve editor. This will change the curve of the line without adding more keys.

Look at the change in Z over time.

Image

This will make the ball slow down as it gets to max hight, then speed up has it falls back down until it slams into the ground and bounces back.

The problem lies in that new users will see that the ball dose not bounce the way they would like it to and because they are unaware of the IPO curve editor they will try and fix the problem by hand by placing a key at each frame of animation. This will produce something like this.

Image

This is time consuming and energy demanding.

I'm only pointing this out because metche_steele said that
metche_steele wrote: ...it requires someone trained to sit there and do the massive batch of animation frame by frame.
By the wording I'm just guessing but it sounds like the incorrect way of animating. Witch there is of course nothing to be ashamed about.

However I reserve the right to be totally wrong because I have never animated a character.
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