Third Person animation and moving speed

[Roland]

When using a Third Person view, how do you guys approach the problem of moving the character at the correct speed that syncs with the feet's. I was thinking of make some kind of measuring of the distance between the feet's and then calculate the movement speed from that. If that works it would solve the move speed for run also.

 

Or is this the wrong way to approach this problem? Any better idea.

[Pixel Perfect]

Exactly Roland, let the animation drive the motion. I use bones in the feet to measure the distance moved per animation and apply that. Good bye to foot skating and it also works beautifully when blending animations, which is almost impossible to calculate otherwise as its constantly changing in the initial frames.

 

Animation movement is then directly linked to the animation speed and always in sync.

 

The NPC in this video I posted some time back demonstrates this technique in action: kingdom of soul path finding and animation demo

[Roland]

Thanks. Good to hear that I'm on the right track.

[Roland]

Have tested now. It becomes almost to real. Needs some smoothing and it works just nice.

[LordHippo]

There is a good talk about animation driven locomotion in GDC12. You can find it in the free section of gdcvault.

 

But I think driving the character's position completely from animations is not a good idea. Cause you know sometimes artists and designers does not have the same interests

[cassius]

I just set the speed of movement I need and then tweak the anim speed until it looks right. Not very technical but seems to work.

[Pixel Perfect]

I just set the speed of movement I need and then tweak the anim speed until it looks right. Not very technical but seems to work.

Thats ok for a constant speed but when accelerating its almost impossible to calc the required motion as its constantly changing whilst accelerating. You notice this most when blending from one motion to another for example idle to walk or walk to run.

 

But I think driving the character's position completely from animations is not a good idea. Cause you know sometimes artists and designers does not have the same interests

Sure, there is no perfect system, all systems have their advantages and disadvantages. I can override my system at any time and under certain circumstances do so. As designers we tend to design and refine our mechanics to reflect what we need to do.

[cassius]

blending is something I have never understood despite reading the anim tutorial.

Maybe someone could explain it in words of one sylable.

[Pixel Perfect]

It's where you effectively blend one animation into another by progressively adding more weight to the new animation as time goes by. The two animations are interpolated all the way through the process based on the weightings which effectively results in say a walk animation smoothly morphing into a run animation. You've probably seen something similar in adverts where they make one persons face change into another then another.

 

You can in fact blend more than two animations together simultaneously and layered systems for doing this are common in game engines.