Animation is really ANNOYING!!!!

**Bwian** · 11-11-2005, 15:44

Aside from my other issues, confusions and hangups from trying to make RTW skeletons do things they were never meant to do, THIS is so annoying!

There is something in either the way I am working, or with the CAS import/export scripts that is messing with my head.

For example...

I just modified the idle animation for the african elephant....I checked it in game, and it behaved as expected. Then I went back to Max and re-imported the anim....and 2 things happen... 1 the movements get cirrupted or lost in some cases.... and ALWAYS I find the root bone has shifted up or along.

Also...I have noticed some other bizarre behaviour....where the edited mount works fine...but the riders flip rapidly back to front.... this seems to indicate a fundamental issue with the position and orientation of the root bone.

On top of that....it can't seem to work out it's x from it's y sometimes....I have noticed cases where I am modifying an anim, and move the slider in the 'x' direction, and the 'y' value alters.

I am getting REALLY bogged down with this

**Bwian** · 11-13-2005, 14:02

OK ... thought I had something....but it seems not.

I tried making some new camel anims, and I took GREAT care to NEVER alter the root bone position at all. I imported an anim, altered it a bit, then exported ... and the rider flips backwards and forwards in the saddle.

The mount does not move, and does exactly what I expected... but something is getting messed up in the relationship between mount and rider . It doesn't happen on all of the animations....which is even odder.

I changed a full set, and only a few are affected...but ALL were modified in the same way.

Anyone out there had success modifying mounts ?

**Bwian** · 11-13-2005, 19:44

More experimentation = more frustration

I have been working solely with the idle anim, since there is nothing to move once you have it in the starting position:

Import stock anim...export unchanged - works fine

Removed all the key-frames except the root bone ones - works fine

Re-positioned all the front legs - works fine

Moved the back legs .... rider now flicks bacwards and forewards.

None of the things I thought were responsible can be ...since the test showed they didn't cause an issue. The rear legs were not moved significantly more than the front

**Bwian** · 11-14-2005, 10:13

OK...another thrill packed installment of this public diary of animation madness... hopefully, others might find this useful, since the total lack of replies points to a general shortage of knowledge in this area!

Anyway.... I have cured the problem...but I still DO NOT understand exactly what is going on. It is linked to a known issue with extreme rotations of bones, but there is clearly more to it than that!

My camel mod invovled some quite 'radical' re-positioning of the legs, and does some nasty things to the bones, but thats another story

What I found, through trial and error, was that the angle of the lower right rear leg bone was the trigger. I straightened it and the problem went away. OK...I hear you say...we knew that... but explain this...

That leg was rotated 59 degrees....yet the corresponding front leg is rotated 69 degrees with no problem at all. It also only relates to the STARTING point of the bones. There are plenty of bones which rotate a LOT further than that in the routines, with no ill effects at all.

Would love to know why this happens......

Anyway...when I finally complete my animation tutorial, this is all good stuff to add

**Sundjata Keita** · 11-15-2005, 08:25

This stuff is always helpful Bwian so please keep documenting your trials and errors for us. I'm about to start the rifle animations once more for ZTW and hopefully this kind of thing will help.

Regards,

Sundjata

**Bwian** · 11-15-2005, 09:26

Equally freaky for me was what occurred when I made the 'heavy' version of the skelton based on an elelphant.

The bones were rotated out 90 degrees from the shoulders, with the intention of rotating the lower leg bone to form a rotor blade animation... this was fine.

I noticed that the front and rear limbs did not align perfectly, so I opushed both forward 22 degrees to line things up ... and this triggered flickering. I am of the opinion that the thing may be related to the TOTAL amount of rotation in a limb. Either that or it's just a randon PITA!

Anyway....here's what I have started doing:

Choose the 'idle' anim as a start point. Begin with the model in it's reference pose, and move the bones into their start point for the anim with the most extreme rotations. Then check it in game. I choose the 'idle' since you see it as soon as teh battle formation screen pops up, and nothing is moving about.

Anyway...thats it for this one :D Armed with the hard-earned trial and error lessons, I have done the anims I wanted. Now to do the models to hang on them!!!

**Vercingetorix** · 11-15-2005, 23:53

Originally Posted by Bwian

More experimentation = more frustration

I have been working solely with the idle anim, since there is nothing to move once you have it in the starting position:

Import stock anim...export unchanged - works fine

Removed all the key-frames except the root bone ones - works fine

Re-positioned all the front legs - works fine

Moved the back legs .... rider now flicks bacwards and forewards.

None of the things I thought were responsible can be ...since the test showed they didn't cause an issue. The rear legs were not moved significantly more than the front

Unless I am misreading you, you should never move the bones (except the root bone) in an animation! Otherwise you will enter a world of pain... because the way quaternion animation works, the position of a bone changes the effect of the rotation. And since RTW animations do not store the position of the bone (except the root bone and the pelvis bone) in the animation files you will get unpredictable and undesirable effects.

**Bwian** · 11-16-2005, 00:49

all 'moves' are rotation. The only bone to get a translational move is the root bone. The effect I found was caused by rotation.

I can't pin down a specific cause.....but certain bones rotated a certain way seem to cause an issue with mounts...namely the ride switching rapidly from facing front to facing backwards.

Odd fact number 2 was that it didn't affect all animations for a given skeleton...

Odd fact number 3 was that certain bones seem to have issues when you come to edit them, which is why I now build from scratch, rather than trying to edit an existing one...

Odd fact number 4... the horse anims are SCREWED... I thought I had messed something up in my anim pack, so I re-installed and re-did it...but no...it's the originals. Some of the animations when imported do stupid things. I have avoided doing any edits on those...since I doubt very much that I will get good results editing something that clearly has issues

Anyway....I don't know if this a side effect of the differences between the method CA used as opposed to XIDX or what..... but I managed to work around the problem for now.

**wlesmana** · 11-17-2005, 14:04

Ya, I got the same frustrations although not to your extend. I modified the horse's animations into a dog's animations (for warg riders) and as I import animations, the scene root in some of them just went fidgety on me. I had to manually set their positions to export it correctly.

I understood that we can't make new bones and only rotate existing ones. But how something as simple as that is messing up animations is just ridiculous.

Some weird things I discovered while playing around with animations:
- Modding an elephant's death animation in any way will result in a glitch, where the final resting corpse will get "pushed" in the direction of positive x axis.
- Modding a horse's "refuse" animation will result in the animation being triggered every time you make your cavalry attack anything. Leaving it unmodded will never trigger the "refuse" event.

Btw, did they ever fix the part where 45 degrees rotation makes the soldier act all hyper because they can't turn less than 45 degrees? It's annoying the heck out of me because I had to use the original animations for turning around.

**Bwian** · 11-17-2005, 15:44

Must admit...I didn't get this one... but then, I DIDN'T mess with the horse ;) All ,y small sized mounts are based on the Camel skeleton. This proved to be a lot more stable.

When I imported the anims from the Horse, I thought I had a corrupted animation file and re-installed just to check!

For the turn left/right anims, I did this:

Open up two instances of Max. In one, I have the stock anim. In teh other, my fresh and ref-posed model. First move to start position, then VERY carefully copy teh translation moves of the root bone. Do teh same with the Z axis rotation of the base bone around the root. Then you can worry about the rest! Don't know if that worked ... or if teh camel and elephant just don't suffer so badly as the horse!

I also do NOT edit the existing skeletons, but would rasther slavishly copy out all the rotations than suffer the wierd and unpredictable hiccups that the stock skeletons exhibit. I have often wondered if teh incredibly small size of teh units when imported into Max makes for some rounding off errors or some such.

Also...for those who hadn't figured it out... if you rotate a bone, all the children of that bone receive that rotation. This can get a bit confusing if you don't work from the root out to the feet/head etc.

THis was one of teh problems I hit trying to make a 'mech type' walking animation.... I forgot the rocking from side to side aspect, and my anim looked like he was skating! It was teh side to side rocking motion that gave the impression of weight to teh steps.