Hi,

I am currently trying to make an animation for a man walking up stairs. I have created the animation (using bones) in MED and while running it through the cycle in MED it looks perfectly fine. However when i watch the animation in the game there are odd deformations that occur. For example when he lifts his leg up the calf and everything below it shrinks. And the longer the distance the more deformation (shrinking) occurs. I thought that perhaps i just didn't have enough frames so i added more frames but this creates a kind of bobbing effect and there is still some deformation. I went through all my animations and apparently they all do it i just had not noticed it up until now because the other animation movements were small. I'm not sure if this is an engine problem and i haven't been able to find much info on the forums.

I have already posted in A7 Engine : Original Post in A7 Engine

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I am using LiteC 1.70.1 and the MED that comes with it.

Thanks,
AJ

Maybe, you forget

ent_animate(me,NULL,0,0); // reset all bones

as in the example?

When you dont reset your bones, your animations add up over time and give strange results.

Another possibility is that you have too few frames in your animation, interpolating means inbetween values from frame to frame, for instance if you rotate something and have one frame only every 90 degrees then interpolation will look wrong.

i had tried reseting the bone using ent_bonereset but no luck. And as a side note from certain functions i was working on earlier it seemed as though ent_animate does its own bone reset but i may be wrong on that. but in any case i had tried reseting the bones.

"Another possibility is that you have too few frames in your animation, interpolating means inbetween values from frame to frame, for instance if you rotate something and have one frame only every 90 degrees then interpolation will look wrong."

please view the original thread linked in my first post

Thanks,
AJ

I have no other suggestions aside from those that you've already got. Can you send the model and your animation script to Support? Then maybe I can then see what's wrong.

I'm 'guessing' it has something to do with math, just because I heard word 'interpolation' haha. Maybe you should check your math books forever!

Thanks for the reply jcl, I would more than happy to send it in. I'll have it sent this afternoon after i get off of work. As for the script, there is nothing in it except for the ent_animate (and everything used to make the model show up of course) but i will send it in aswell.

MokyjeBrute <----- what the hell is he going on about?

Thanks,
AJ

jcl,

Sorry it took so long but i finally had a chance to send my code and model to you.

Thanks,
AJ

Thanks, the support got it. But we found nothing unusual with your model.

The deformation is just due to the fact that the foot is lifted and tilted at the same time. All vertices move along straight lines during interpolation, so they come closer together, giving the impression of shrinking. This is absolutely normal. It can easily be fixed by using more frames. Bones frames are cheap, so there is no reason to animate a scene with only a few frames, as you would do with vertex animation.

Thanks for taking the time to look at it,

As a side question why does it look fine in MED but not in the engine. In any case thank you very much for taking a look.

Thanks,
AJ

I had checked it in MED, but there was exactly the same deformation. It was just less visible because MED uses a wider view angle.