"run" animation not showing up in-game?
by Ross McCoy · in General Discussion · 01/05/2002 (12:33 am) · 2 replies
OK, I'll try to explain this correctly, its a little odd :)
I've made a player model to use for our game, complete with animations for the root and running, as well as other animations. For right now, I'm concentrating on getting the model into the game with minimal effort, so I made sure that the naming is identical to the Torque demo model and animations (player.dts, player_forward.dsq, player_root.dsq, etc.), with the hopes of it catching immediately in the game. And it work...partly. The idle animation I made for the 'root' works fine...but the animation I used for 'player_forward' in order to walk, won't trigger. The sequence name is the same, and all of my animations show up in the model viewer. The model physically moves forward, but won't perform the animation to walk.
Now this is the wierd thing. I haven't made any kind of 'jump' sequence, yet one of our team members changed the 'run' sequence name in the player.cs to 'jump'...and when the model jumps, it triggers the run animation! We tried using other sequence names that were used with the Torque model to get a similar effect(look, side, back), and the ones associated with walking would not work. Others would trigger an animation...
So far, we've concluded that the animations work fine themselves, and that the issue might be in how the game engine sees the model...? The skeletal structure of the biped in our model is different from the Torque model skeleton. While the Torque model has 3 sections for the spine, ours has 1. Other than the size of our model (Larger), there's no other difference. We were thinking that the engine sees our model structure as incorrect, and won't trigger the animations. I was hoping that someone could shed light on how Torque processes animations that deal with movement/walking, and possibly help out with a solution to this dillema.
Note - no matter what "animation" you put in the run sequence, it doesn't work. Same for back, side, etc.
Hope you can help!
Thanks
I've made a player model to use for our game, complete with animations for the root and running, as well as other animations. For right now, I'm concentrating on getting the model into the game with minimal effort, so I made sure that the naming is identical to the Torque demo model and animations (player.dts, player_forward.dsq, player_root.dsq, etc.), with the hopes of it catching immediately in the game. And it work...partly. The idle animation I made for the 'root' works fine...but the animation I used for 'player_forward' in order to walk, won't trigger. The sequence name is the same, and all of my animations show up in the model viewer. The model physically moves forward, but won't perform the animation to walk.
Now this is the wierd thing. I haven't made any kind of 'jump' sequence, yet one of our team members changed the 'run' sequence name in the player.cs to 'jump'...and when the model jumps, it triggers the run animation! We tried using other sequence names that were used with the Torque model to get a similar effect(look, side, back), and the ones associated with walking would not work. Others would trigger an animation...
So far, we've concluded that the animations work fine themselves, and that the issue might be in how the game engine sees the model...? The skeletal structure of the biped in our model is different from the Torque model skeleton. While the Torque model has 3 sections for the spine, ours has 1. Other than the size of our model (Larger), there's no other difference. We were thinking that the engine sees our model structure as incorrect, and won't trigger the animations. I was hoping that someone could shed light on how Torque processes animations that deal with movement/walking, and possibly help out with a solution to this dillema.
Note - no matter what "animation" you put in the run sequence, it doesn't work. Same for back, side, etc.
Hope you can help!
Thanks
#2
http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=forums&page=result.thread&qt=2949
01/06/2002 (1:22 pm)
Check out this too:http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=forums&page=result.thread&qt=2949
Torque Owner Josh Albrecht
The engine uses things called "ground transforms" in animations that pertain to actual movement through the game world. This is hardcoded into the engine. Upon loading a model and animation, it looks at the ground transforms of the animations, and based upon the speed of the transforms, assigns the animation as a walk, run, strafe, or backwards movement animation.
Thus, to get working movement animations, you need to export the ground transforms with the exporter. Joe Marschuck (not sure on the spelling of that last name) is currently creating some excellent documentation for the exporter. His docs are already 60 pages long. Inside, I believe he explains ground transforms and how to correclty export them.
I hope this helped. :)