Centaur Animation test

I have been playing around with animations on my centaur a bit, it turns out to be every bit as tricky as I thought it would (perhaps more). The hair is not skinned. the rest has only default skin and only half the body has a control rig, but I am messing around trying to figure out how to go about this. At the moment it is looking truly beautiful, but at least it is going more in the right direction than it did when I started out.

The difficulty does not only lie in the fact that it is a horse (which are very difficult to animate) but also in that it has double spines, four arms and a number of tails, including the hair. I need to figure out a way to either create a control rig where I can have 6 limbs and double spines or perhaps a way to animate without a control rig.

Might be a good idea to take inspiration from Pacman for my next character... But then again, what's the point if you don't try to challenge yourself? (Do not know how I manage to find a way to make everything as difficult as possible for myself).

Nihteana: Animations

A while ago I finished Nihteana's animations, at least up until a point where I could do no more before I could see all of them implemented correctly in the engine. Fortunately the coders have not found any issues so far.

Nihteana out for a walk, testing the rig and skin in 3Ds Max

I had all my mocap data cleaned since before Christmas and the frames which I was going to use selected. As expected her animations were like a dream to clean up, since I was completely still apart from moving my upper body when doing the shoot and how she always keep her arms apart, there was barely any occlusion. I had hopes that Nihteana's animations would be less of a problem than Tamarrion's had been.

Elbow bone not matching fold in 3Ds Max

 I soon noticed that there was an issue with her arm, as I could not get the elbow to fold properly. It turned out that I had not aligned the fold and the bone well enough, meaning that I had to return to the high poly sculpt to fix it and then readjust the lowpoly and re-skin the model. So Tamarrion taught me how not to make a shoulder and Nihteana how not to make an elbow. This was a setback, but it also gave me a chance to go back to the highpoly and make her hands bigger and have a better-looking bend, pushing their quality further.

Channel spell animation, before animating fingers

The experience of animating hands which I had had before was that it was not that big of an issue. The difference between Tamarrion and Nihteana is that Tamarrion always has one hand firm on her sword and the other slightly closed, all fingers moving simultaneously while Nihteana's animations are all about the movement of her long fingers. I hoped that they just might not be a problem although I had a feeling deep inside that I could be terribly wrong. That feeling was right. The fingers turned out to be a complete pain, and it was seriously tricky to figure out how they would move in relation to each other. What I did was film my own hands, trying to move them as I wanted her fingers to move and then take keyframe screenshots to see how the fingers should be positioned at different stages of the animations. This was something that I had to redo several times with various animations, since they did not want to cooperate. I had to be really really careful in which order I applied the poses on the fingers.

Screenshot used for her finger animations

Motionbuilder was not always cooperating either, causing additional issues with the key frame animations for the fingers. Apart from the fingers, my biggest problem, which I have never come across before, which occurred in almost every single animation was that there was twitching in the upper body flowing all the way through the arms and hands. This meant that I had to go and look at the fcurves of every single bone to find and attempt to fix the problem. It took me a great deal of time and I am still not completely sure of why I had this issue. Sometimes the animation had seemed fine while working on it and then all of a sudden there it was. I believe that it might have something to do with which frames you select when you choose your looping sequence, but I had been really careful to make sure that the first and last frames matched as close as possible in position.

Trying to fix the fcurves

I also got this weird bug in Motionbuilder (2015) it took me days to find no answer at all until I finally found someone with the same problem. The problem I had was that the bones were invisible even though the xray mode was activated. I tried sending the file to a friend and he could see the rig, so I knew it was not the file but the program. To fixed this I did a complete reinstall of the software, which worked, for a day or so. This is when I finally found the answer, it seems as if Motionbuilder remembers this "setting" for the file, so you have to open Motionbuilder by opening an uncorrupted file and from that open up the file you want to work with.

Skinning below belt is not perfect, but it does not matter since

 we use cloth physics

Animating the shoulder pads was another challenge, which I had to redo a couple of times. I needed to readjust the rig slightly to get a better pivot point, but I believe this is something that can still be improved. This was also an attempt to fix an issue with the feathers which seemed to have a life of their own. Somehow the feathers moved from there position in the keyframes when I added new ones. Since I had to move the shoulder pads with the arms my greatest fear was that they would twitch between animations since I was unable to use poses on them for some reason. The programmer who is working with her has not noticed any problem with them so far though.

Feathers no longer wanting to follow their bones

There was another great issue with the shoulder pads however, which caused a great deal of stress. Once I had redone all their animations, since they would not follow when I transferred the animations to an updated version of the model, everything was working fine in Motionbuilder so I sent it to my colleague to test in the engine. Everything seemed to be working fine, apart from the small detail of the shoulder pads and skulls hanging from the belt were flying around in a complete mess somewhere in the vicinity of the character model. I went back to Motionbuilder to find what could be wrong, but did not find anything. I tried creating a clean take and import the animations to a new character but there was no difference. It was only the .fbx from Motionbuilder, one that was rigged and skinned but not animated from 3Ds Max was perfect. I tried to find an answer if it could have anything to do with the character extensions but found nothing. To test if it might be something with Unity I opened the .fbx in Unreal and all animations worked perfectly.

Dance dance, Underground Rave test in Unreal

 






This meant that whatever the issue was it was something that only Unity reacted on. The solution turned out to be removing the skinning of the shoulder pads and skulls, luckily they were skinned as separate objects, reset the xform and re-skin them. This time when I imported the animations, expecting to have to redo the shoulder pad animations, everything seemed to follow and I could send it to test in Unity again. This time there were no problems that we could find before seeing how the animations blend between each other when she behaves in the way she is supposed to in the game, meaning that my work was done for this time.

More Fun with Animations!

Problems

Today has been a marvellous day of setbacks. Apart from successfully adding some widgets to our blog the day has been full of nothing but problems.

I have been looking at updating Tamarrion's model to fix her shoulders but there have been problems with the length of the arms, shaping the shoulders, the rig and the skinning. That means pretty much everything.

Without having found any solutions yet I am a least aware of a great deal of issues now and I'll leave you with some pretty pictures of todays adventures with Tamarrion!

Guide through Cortex and Motion Builder

Animation Analysis

This is one blog assignment that I actually found very difficult to write, we were asked to choose three games which I admire the animations of. This is something that I have never really considered, I think that bad animations is something that makes you feel that something is just not right while good animations go unnoticed as everything is as it is supposed to be. The games I chose in the end were Tomb Raider, Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed Black Flag.

Tomb Raider - Shooting Bow

The task was to identify key poses used in the game, for instance idle and attack animations, for Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed this was made difficult by the enormous amounts of animations so I tried to narrow it down to the basics.

Assassin's Creed - Hang/Swing (top) Walk (below)

Skyrim - Walk Ready (top) Walk Relaxed (below)

Tomb Raider - Walk

I do think that the poses and silhouettes are easy to read although there are some big differences between the games. They are easy to read because they all use body language well, with relaxed straight poses in contrast with the angled poses when ready for action. The line of action is also made a lot more visible in the ready poses where the angles of the arms, legs and bodies as well as the heads are pointing towards a centre of attention.

Run animations from all three games

It seems to me that what makes the poses blend smoothly is that they use the same starting position. I noticed that one thing all games had in common was that the characters always have their left foot slightly in front of the right which I believe will easily float into moving the weight to that foot and into a movement cycle.

 

Skyrim - Idle Relaxed (top) vs. Ready (bottom)

My favourite pose from Assassin’s Creed is probably the attack pose to the left as you can see his entire body turning and angling in anticipation of movement. The sword he wields is also used to enforce the movement.

Attack poses from Assassin's Creed

In Skyrim it is the crouch/sneak as it is very angled and expressive, it reads very clearly as something is about to happen. They have used a lot of angles, not only in arms and legs but also the head and between upper body and hips; it makes the player understand that there is danger ahead.

Skyrim - Crouch (top) and Sneak (bottom)

Tomb Raider is more difficult, they have managed to create an expressive body language that shows the character’s personality. I do like the relaxed idle poses as she touches her arm or wounds showing the player that she is in pain, it amplifies the story without using cutscenes or dialogue. There is also the sneak, for the same reasons as in Skyrim with the angles, in Tomb Raider however the angles are used differently to show that she is not all that confident and that she is scared. Lara is not as upright when sneaking as the Skyrim character that faces danger head on; she has her head down and keeps her arms close to her body which signals that she is feeling scared in contrary to Skyrim where the arms and legs are more to the sides as if trying to look powerful and fearless.

 

Tomb Raider - Sneak/Crouch (top), with Bow (below)

Tomb Raider - Idle Relaxed

I think that overall the sneak/crouches are easiest to read simply because it has such a great impact on the silhouette when the characters curl up and angles their bodies. This is also a very clear difference between the relaxed and ready stances as the characters curls up and angles in them as well.

 

Assassin's Creed - Crouch/Sneak

It is very difficult to think of what pose is the hardest to read since I feel that they are all readable. Perhaps it could be the ready idle pose in Tomb Raider where Lara has her bow out but her body is kind of slouched forwards in a slightly odd pose but I also think that it could be a narrative decision behind it. It shows a character that is not used to handling weapons and being in danger or battle and that is not very confident.

 

 

Tomb Raider - Idle Ready

Assassin’s Creed is similar to Tomb Raider with the idle ready; he also has a slightly relaxed body posture although he has his weapons out and is ready for action. There is a clear difference between them though; his body is much more upright, almost leaning the upper body slightly back with the groin area forwards as a result of bending the knees to be ready to move. His shoulders and head are also looking as if going a bit forwards, this pose shows a very different personality, he is confident and has seen battle many times before, telling any enemies that “you don’t want to mess with me”.

Assassin's Creed - Idle Ready

One interesting thing that I noticed was a big difference between Skyrim and the other two games. There seems to be a much greater variety of animations in Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed than in Skyrim, they are also much more expressive and less stylized. I think that this is based on the gameplay and style of the games. Most importantly both Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed are games that are focused on telling the story of the character; the player is allowed to be part of a moment of their lives where they must show personality and emotions to keep the players’ interest. This means that they have many unique animations showing different states of mind and abilities and that the body language is more expressive.

Assassin's Creed - Idle Relaxed

Tomb Raider - Using item (top), Climbing (bottom)

Skyrim however is a game where the character is uncovering the story of the world, it is not centred on the character and the players can create as many and different characters as they want. The character is more of an avatar than an important part of the story. The animations need to be applicable to whichever character the player wants it to be and therefore they do not show personality like the other two games. The movement is more generalised and stylized although very big.

Skyrim Attacks (Magic - top, Melee - bottom)