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Anim-Transition Blog


nasKo

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Hello! Today we are celebrating animation technology to do anim transitions going into the codebase of the internal Build 41 test version. ‘What are these?’ I hear you cry. Well, we have a clever man in Australia who can explain. Over to Zac!

“Up until now, the character would go from standing, to walking,to sneaking, to running, to standing again. At every state change, there was no lead-in. We were using some maths to blend from one pose to another, but it really wasn’t enough.

“The change was still looking fairly unnatural in some cases. The character had an air of defying gravity, for example, when he/she suddenly went from standing still to full sprint.”

“As of now in the internal test build, we can add transition animations. So in the described instance it’s: StandingToRunning. This is where the character will change stance, shift their weight, and launch into a run. As a result it all seems much more lifelike.

So, check this out:

As you can see above, another area where this is helping a lot is in aiming animations where there’s an object in the character’s hands. Formerly, due to some complex under the bonnet maths, when it did this blend between the two poses you ended up with, say, a gun floating in the air between the hands rather than being realistically held.

Now, however, with this Zac anim-transitioning magic we can have a handcrafted tailor-made animation to make the character aim down the sights and bridge the gap between the two poses. So this makes everything looks much more sleek and cool.

Here comes the traditional disclaimer: although these videos are still looking super-cool we’re still not at a point we can release a public beta. There’s a bunch of optimization to go in, some MP and SP save system improvements we need to test and mix in, Zac needs to work on the rotation blending for wheeling on spot / zombie alert walking toward player angles etc.

We also need to work on zed hordes – pooling what states zombies are in, and sharing a smaller pool of zombie skeletons for the same anims so we get better performance when there’s a horde on-screen.

(Seeing as Zac was previously the guy who got two million dancing penguin models on the Wiithough, we’ve undoubtedly got the best man for the job.)

We should also probably fix the bug in the current build that makes survivors look like this. Maybe.

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Slenderman likes to bake cakes

This week’s character creation screen-created dictator from our hardy bunch of internal testers. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right hereOur Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

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The player movement animations are looking cant wait. :)

 

That creepy malformed zombie is creepy but im glad that will get fixed.

 

Keep up the good word for the animations update im looking forward to playing.

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Is it just me or is that aiming stance a little slow to ready? I've been playing a ton of Arizona Sunshine lately and I can tell you I get my hands up a lot quicker than that if there's a zed about! The original anim looked maybe better on that one?

Edited by trombonaught
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47 minutes ago, trombonaught said:

Is it just me or is that aiming stance a little slow to ready? I've been playing a ton of Arizona Sunshine lately and I can tell you I get my hands up a lot quicker than that if there's a zed about! The original anim looked maybe better on that one?

 

Yeah, I agree with you on that. The new animation just doesn't look right. There's no way you would aim that slowly with a handgun.

 

But you could keep that new anim, and fasten it a bit, if you don't wish to throw away what I guess has required some hardwork to achieve.

Edited by ShadowHits
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2 hours ago, ShadowHits said:

 

Yeah, I agree with you on that. The new animation just doesn't look right. There's no way you would aim that slowly with a handgun.

 

But you could keep that new anim, and fasten it a bit, if you don't wish to throw away what I guess has required some hardwork to achieve.

 

Its almost like it was just added and it isn't the final version, isn't it?

 

Throw it out... Jesus. It's bad enough that though most obvious things always get called out, as though we are oblivious, to it, but to act like it's trash is taking things to another level.

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12 hours ago, EnigmaGrey said:

 

Its almost like it was just added and it isn't the final version, isn't it?

 

Throw it out... Jesus. It's bad enough that though most obvious things always get called out, as though we are oblivious, to it, but to act like it's trash is taking things to another level.

Not sure why you think they're acting like it's trash, all they said was that it should be fastened a bit.

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13 hours ago, EnigmaGrey said:

 

Its almost like it was just added and it isn't the final version, isn't it?

 

Throw it out... Jesus. It's bad enough that though most obvious things always get called out, as though we are oblivious, to it, but to act like it's trash is taking things to another level.

 

Chill, dude. It was constructive feedback.

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3 hours ago, Geras said:

 

Chill, dude. It was constructive feedback.

What trombonaught wrote is constructive. The follow is just lumping on and making it seem worse.

 

3 hours ago, Lunar_Wolfie said:

Not sure why you think they're acting like it's trash, all they said was that it should be fastened a bit.

People don't "throw out" things that just need a little tweak. If that were left out, I'd agree, but it wasn't and and it's not appreciated.

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On 6/24/2019 at 1:45 AM, EnigmaGrey said:

it's not appreciated.

Just gotta take it with a pinch of salt and leave it to natural selection. ;) I feel ya pain.


Oooooh yea, F***in' awesome work on anim build!! Its making me so excited my legs are shaking like a school girl at justin bieber concert!!!

 

Edited by MrCouper
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On 6/22/2019 at 4:29 PM, ShadowHits said:

you could keep that new anim, and fasten it a bit, if you don't wish to throw away what I guess has required some hardwork to achieve.

 

On 6/23/2019 at 10:45 AM, EnigmaGrey said:

People don't "throw out" things that just need a little tweak. If that were left out, I'd agree, but it wasn't and and it's not appreciated.

 

I don't want to try to play the devil's advocate here but he said "IF you don't wish", he didn't say necessarily to throw it out? And also people sometimes just don't know how the process of game development works, and often think that whatever a thing is not perfect, they (artists in general) throw it out and start from scratch just for perfection. But I can understand you, having to manage this forum and the subreddit, of course you can be stressed too! ^_^ I frequent the subreddit for just a few months and already seen a bunch of very rude people. It's certainly not an easy task.

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On 6/22/2019 at 10:28 PM, EnigmaGrey said:

It's bad enough that though most obvious things always get called out, as though we are oblivious, to it

 

I've noticed this trend for a while now, since before vehicles were released. People can't seem to wrap their noodle around the fact that what's presented in Mondoids is not final and there's still work to be done/room for improvement, even if its written directly in the Mondoid.

 

The problem is people get so used to what's in Zomboid already that when something changes (animations for example) it's going to look weird to people regardless, because it's not what they're familiar with. If the new animations were in from the start, people wouldn't bat an eyelid.

 

Keep doing what you're doing though. We all appreciate it massively and are super excited for the update.

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On 6/22/2019 at 11:28 PM, EnigmaGrey said:

 

Its almost like it was just added and it isn't the final version, isn't it?

 

Throw it out... Jesus. It's bad enough that though most obvious things always get called out, as though we are oblivious, to it, but to act like it's trash is taking things to another level.


Dude, relax. I never said they had to throw out this new anim, I do like it the way it is, just thought it would look better if it was fastened a bit.

 

In fact, the real reason why I mentionned the option of throwing it out is because someone said that the previous anim looked better in his opinion. I reacted to that, saying that they could KEEP the new one, improving it just a bit, instead of throwing it out to keep the original anim.

 

Anyway, I know that what's in Thurdoids isn't final work. But one of the reasons why they make thursdoids is also for us to give feedback, wich I think to be constructive in my case...

Edited by ShadowHits
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