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[gaarzen]

Hey guys,
Our animator wonders about the jumping animation, it is not very clear in the wiki and I wonder if anyone can clarify it for us.
Does the animation need to be made out of 3 parts, a leap animation, a mid air animation and a fall animation?

Thanks !

[WorldWideZ]

if you are following the sample character example then yes. if you change the way the AAS and ACCC function then you might need something different

[keeperofstars]

The default character controller has a jump, falling, landing cycle / process that it passes.

So jump is passed and animates the upward motion of the jump.
After it's peak or end the falling animation plays.
Once the player collides with something below them, a command to play the landing animation is made.

This gives you a wide range of flexibility.

You could make it all one animation and void out the falling or landing, but you need them anyways.

So for example the player is on a wall and walks off it, that will trigger the falling animation to loop till they hit some / land on something, at which you want a landing effect to happen.
So falling and landing can happen without starting off with a jump.

Also a jump might not mean a falling or landing.
The player jumps up to a new platform, chances are falling might not happen. Landing would still happen, but could be overridden to be more robust with taking into account duration of fall. If under x amount then don't play landing, if over Y amount play crushed to death instead of landing.

The HE animation system is extremely super powerful for letting you have total flexibility in animations. Need to think about breaking animations down to really small chunks of animation and then linking, and streaming them together.

For example a 3 hit combo attack could be made with just a single animation, or you could make each swing of the attack it's own animation and then use the scripts to make it into a single animation and can even make it randomly select the orders. Now that 3 hit combo attack has a bit of random effect to it.

Just like the walk run and walkrun combos. Add on the animation masks / layers, and you get total control over the player via scripts vs set animations.

[gaarzen]

Thanks for the replies !
I want to cover a basic working and logical layout and the Animating Character Tutorial doesn't really explain what animation parts needed.
If I understand correctly you suggest having a leap + mid air animation, a falling animation and a landing animation, meaning 3? Or should the leap and mid air be separated as well? What is ideal?
Thanks.

[keeperofstars]

The base controller calls for 3.

Jump (direction of player upwards)
falling (after jump finishes or any time the characters motion is in a downwards direction)
Landing (fires at contact with collision surface after falling)

So need 3 to match the default controller.

Here in this tutorial I made I list off all the basic movements the default controller requests / makes.
Note the walkrun is a combination animation of the walk and run.

https://community.heroengine.com/forums/index.php/topic,4826.0.html

Here is a snippet.

Code: [Select]

!
!Basic AnimationSet.dat with a tempalte idle sequence listed
Version=1
[SEQUENCES]
  idle
  walk
  run
  backingup
  death
  walkrun
  jump
  falling
  landing
  knockdown
  standup
  knockback
  stunned
  paralyzed
  swimidle
  swimforward
  swimbackwards
 

[gaarzen]

Awesome, thanks so much !

[gaarzen]

Hey, sorry for re-opening this subject but we are confused about those 3 animation sequences.
I was sure the animator should control the strength of the jump and when the jump occurs because if HE does it then the sync is not accurate.
The animator should create the jumping anticipation, the leap and the peak in the air (where his legs are most bent).
But in HE it seems that the Y axis is being controlled by the engine and not by the animation, would that mean that with the default controller option we can only create a quick leap animation and HE would define the changes on the Y axis regardless? Also, does that mean the falling animation should also be done without changing the Y axis during the animation as well?

Thanks !

[HE-BENNETT]

It is likely you will want to tweak the behavior of the default controller.

In any case, if you look at the sample character, you will see that there is almost no lead into the jump. No real anticipation.  Depending on how you want the game to control and feel, it may not make sense to have that.  It can make it seem clunky for many games to take the time (and control from the player) for proper anticipation.

You can always override the jump impulse force, but if you want a different style of jumping, you will probably need to edit the controller.

[gaarzen]

It is likely you will want to tweak the behavior of the default controller.

In any case, if you look at the sample character, you will see that there is almost no lead into the jump. No real anticipation.  Depending on how you want the game to control and feel, it may not make sense to have that.  It can make it seem clunky for many games to take the time (and control from the player) for proper anticipation.

You can always override the jump impulse force, but if you want a different style of jumping, you will probably need to edit the controller.

Thanks for replying Bennett,
I understand the need for a very quick anticipation. With the default controller I noticed only Y is automated by the engine and that the character only jumps in place. In case we want to make it jump to different directions according to the player choice do we need to do that with different Jumping animations to all directions? Should we modify the controller to automate directions just like it does with the Y axis?

Also, we created a leap animation that doesn't affect the height so it could work with the default controller, taking the character higher in the Y axis during gameplay, however, the animation loops and he leaps many times until he reaches that height. What's the default technique to make it do the leap animation once?

Thanks a lot !

[HE-Cooper]

Gaarzen, you can make the jump animation, and locomotion system do whatever you'd like. We provide an example that's relatively standard to the genre (despite the auto rotate to face away from camera). Most commonly, jump animations consist of a take off, float loop, and landing. The game logic sets the movement, as is the case with all the other locomotion aspects, and the animations play on the client.

It's then also common to setup a blend out of the run animation into the take off, and out of the landing into the run animation. Some games also do a different set of take of and landing for if the player is standing still as opposed to running.

[keeperofstars]

You can control the looping aspect in the animation scripts, and force the animation to hold the last frame if you want, till get gets a new animation call. Versus starting over / looping. Now with that said if the controller is constantly calling for the jump animation to happen, IE the space bar is being held down or such, then you have to work / adapt the character controller a bit. To block the input from coming back in within a x period of time.

[gaarzen]

Got it ! Thanks a lot guys