Root Motion

[SpiderPig]

Anyone heard / have thoughts on root motion vs treadmill motion for Leadwerks?

As far as I can tell; Treadmill motion is where you move the characters controller via code at a constant speed, and root motion is where you let the root bone of your animation say how fast and far your controller moves.  Just wondering what your thoughts are on both approaches

[Rick]

I suppose one puts the speed in the hands of the programmer and the other the animator. As a programmer I'd want control of the speed but if I had an animator on the team I'd be fine with them having control as it's something I wouldn't have to worry about then because matching up movement speed an animation speed can be tricky sometimes.

[Genebris]

Root motion is better because it's more realistic, immersive and looks more polished. Those are my thoughts ?

I'm pretty sure you can still control the speed with root motion: you just change the animation speed.

[Rick]

I would assume with root motion speed the engine would be setting speed of movement using animation speed? Therefore I would think we would also be able to make that link ourselves? There just must be a formula to get the speed based on animation data.

[SpiderPig]

I think whats happening is the animator will move the root bone in the direction of travel, and then you copy that movement to the character controller.  It would take some working out but I don't think it'll be too hard to implement.

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Root motion is better because it's more realistic, immersive and looks more polished.

That's what I was thinking too.

[gamecreator]

Edit: never mind, I think there's more to it that I didn't think through.

[SpiderPig]

If an object has root motion, that means the bones / mesh must move away from the origin point so the character can't be parented to the controller... or you could parent the character to the controller, move the controller forward based on the root motion and move the character entity backwards at the same rate... ?  Code to manage this could be written once and then all movements would be controlled via animations.  I can see this being good for animals that run around all over the place, but for a character... not sure..