TheGatewayOfRealities
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Stopping animations and crouching
🕑 Added 2018-04-30 06:57:32 +0000 UTC I re-did stopping animations because the old system wasn't really thought through turns out... Challenge lays in that it is important that there is multiple stopping animations: we don't know when the player releases the movement input and when the character is supposed to stop.At the moment of stopping the character can have their right leg in front and left in the back, or other way around.. or both legs can be in the middle, while one in the air and another is on the floor. This resulted the need to have 4 different stopping animations per walk cycle, which wasn't that big of a deal on its own.
However simplifying and optimizing other locomotion animations, especially improving the crouch walking system, suddenly started demanding 4 animations for each walk cycle type... So lets count, walk forward, walk backward, crouch forward, crouch backward... 4*4=16 different stopping half second animations!!! Nopety-nope! At this point it's too complex and it is not modding-friendly and extremely non-modular (what if we want to replace some animation down the line? All stoppings will have to be replaced too!).
It was time to re-think it, and so we did! But I'm going to spare the details about how it works now, its just worth to say that I was able to achieve a very similar result with just total of 3 stopping poses that dynamically blend in depending on leg arrangement. They work for all walk cycles because they are not just simple animations, they are additive: Instead of taking full control and overriding the bones they overlay them, adding to them, and this happens right at the transition between walk and idle states.
Also I re-evaluated the priorities for transitional animations...
Before, in the test movement system, that you can still access with the old prealpha build, when you crouch it played a special transition animation for that ("crouch start", "crouch end", "crouch start when moving" and "crouch end when moving"), but not anymore, again, it was too much half second animations that each require much more work to be put into than they are really worth.
Now it only blends between poses and walk cycles with a custom curve, and result looks very similar to if was hand-animated, while making the system much more elegant and simpler to manage.
Alrigh! Next up swimming, sliding, and climbing. Those two, aside from climbing, should be pretty straightforward to implement, and relatively easy to animate too, after all the rig was done specifically having swimming functionality in mind, making those sinus wave motions of the entire body a few sliders away!
