Tinkering with Animations

[chris330 0]

Hi I've been having a tinker with some anims on OFPAnim. Never made an anmiation before so thought I'd have a go. I've got a few questions to ask from those more experienced with this stuff. Here's a couple of pics:

I assume the <100kb rule still applies so I reduced them to under that size.

1)I noticed some odd rendering by the left arm where the abdomen attaches to the arm. Seems almost like the way the models are made it aint suited to such an animation even though I haven't twisted anything unnecessarily or gone beyond the boundaries of the human body at all. Is this just a model/game limitation?

2)The anim was initially rendering at 90 degrees away from the forward facing direction of the model even though I didn't alter its rotation when I loaded the tankistae p3d in OfpAnim. Is this normal?

3)I also noticed that when setting playmove rather than switchmove the unit goes into weapon on back stance then switches to this new animation. What would I have to do to get it to play an animation from the weapon on back stance to my new stance?

Thanks,

Chris

[sanctuary 19]

1)I noticed some odd rendering by the left arm where the abdomen attaches to the arm. Seems almost like the way the models are made it aint suited to such an animation even though I haven't twisted anything unnecessarily or gone beyond the boundaries of the human body at all. Is this just a model/game limitation?

Either the model has a problem, is built strangely, or you may have made a mistake or if it could be the fact that distorted animations are more noticable when a model is low poly (and the tankista model is very low poly).

Try with this model , it is not high poly, but has more of them than a BIS unit:

http://files.filefront.com/w4trar/;13589914;/fileinfo.html

Put ww4tst.p3d into the OFPAnim "Demo Data" folder

Put ww4tst.lpv into the OFPAnim "Link Data" folder

And see if you observe the same "arm/abdomen" problem.

2)The anim was initially rendering at 90 degrees away from the forward facing direction of the model even though I didn't alter its rotation when I loaded the tankistae p3d in OfpAnim. Is this normal?

Yes that's normal, the default position without any animation loaded is the position of the model itself

For some reason BIS made it so their animations are first rotated 90 degree away in comparison to their model initial stance.

Additionally, it is important to notice that BIS made the default position (the one without animation) with the shoulders and head really strangely placed in comparison to the torso, so you will have to lower a bit the head position and/or move the arms/shoulders or body upper part a bit up/low to get a relatively "human" anatomy.

If that's too much difficult, a good idea is to load an existing and neutral BIS animation and begin to work starting from it. This way it is already oriented correctly and neck/head/arms/shoulders are a bit more in a correct place.

3)I also noticed that when setting playmove rather than switchmove the unit goes into weapon on back stance then switches to this new animation. What would I have to do to get it to play an animation from the weapon on back stance to my new stance?

Well i don't know too much about animations config in addons launched by switchmove/playmove, but you should try to download one of the various static animations pack and give a look if they have the same problem you see, if they don't, give a closer look to their config.cpp.

On Ofp info, look for Wilco or Hunter anim packs, those static animations have been used a very lot in the various combat photography thread.

[chris330 0]

That's great! Cheers pal I'll prob have more questions but first I want to get familiar with the solutions you've suggested as they sound very good.

I also noticed by the way even one of flashpoint gamer's anims (which are brill) had the same issue with the default solider unit where the abdomen vertice behaves weird when you orientate the arm a certain way.