Hi,

A couple of questions to those of you who have had a chance to mess around with bones and the new bones animation commands in A6. I haven't upgraded to A6 yet, so I'm just reading the documentation and trying to work out how it all works, which is difficult to visualise without seeing it in MED and messing around with the functions...

1) ent_bonerotate. This sounds like a great function. Would this enable me to turn the torso of a model in a specific direction whilst the legs remain facing the original direction? If so, how does it work? Especially:

a)In the documentation it says that you name the bone, and all of its children are rotated. Does this mean that you can somehow give bones (or joints) individual names in MED?

b) How would you set up a skeleton so that only a torso was rotated? Eg. If there is a joint at the centre of the hip, from which the rest of the skeleton comprises its children, how would you make it so that by rotating this joint, only the upper bones would rotate, not the lower ones? Or am I approaching this wrong? Would you in fact create another child joint from the hip joint and then create the rest of the torso from this, and then rotate that bone? (Er, I hope you can understand what I mean... )

2) Is it easier to blend animations (ie. from walk to run, from run to stand still etc) using bones than using vertex animation, or just as complicated?

3) Using ent_animate() and bone scenes, the manual says that "only bones affected by the given scene are set to their new orientation" - what does this mean? For instance, say I want a human model to run whilst shooting. I use ent_animate() to set the running animation. Then how would I use ent_animate() to play the shooting animation only on the torso? Does this mean that when animating the shooting animation I should not move the legs at all? (But won't even the none-movement of the legs be registered as an animation of sorts and override the running motion?)

Sorry for the bombardment of questions, but I am just trying to work out the new bones commands...

Many thanks,
Keith

Many thanks for the (several times edited! ) reply, Ventilator. It seems that you are the only person who has been thoroughly testing bones as yet.

Some more questions from this:

1) I already looked in the manual, which is where my questions came from, as the manual isn't clear to me at all. I still don't get how combining animations would work. For instance, if you have your whole model running, and use ANM_ADD to add a shooting animation only to the torso, how would this work? If it only adds the angles, the animation would go nuts - the torso would be playing a combination of both running and shooting, rather than just shooting! In this case, I would have thought you would have needed to reset the torso first, but to do that you would need to use ent_bonereset() to reset every bone of the torso, wouldn't you? (Whilst keeping the legs running.)

It seems that no one has actually tested combining animations yet, and as Conitec haven't released a model with the betas to show how this would work, it seems that no one has actually seen it work at all.

...Hang on... I've just looked at the manual again. Could you tell me exactly what is meant by a "bones scene"? How do you allocate bones scenes? Could you have the torso and legs as separate "scenes", even though they are part of the same joined skeleton? This would make more sense... (There is nothing in the MED manual about bones yet.) But it seems that a "bones scene" is just an animation sequence.

2) Regarding the blending, I know it will look better, but do you think it is/will be easier to implement? Blending using vertex animation is very complicated (I have tried it and just about succeeded, but it is clumsy); I was hoping that bones animation would simplify the process...

Okay, I admit it, I'm very confused.

Many thanks,
Keith

sorry for the edits, but i found out several things during and right after writing the post!

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1) I already looked in the manual, which is where my questions came from, as the manual isn't clear to me at all. I still don't get how combining animations would work. For instance, if you have your whole model running, and use ANM_ADD to add a shooting animation only to the torso, how would this work? If it only adds the angles, the animation would go nuts - the torso would be playing a combination of both running and shooting, rather than just shooting!

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yes, the animation would most likely go nuts. i think you need a running animation without an animated torso and a torso animation without animated legs.

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In this case, I would have thought you would have needed to reset the torso first, but to do that you would need to use ent_bonereset() to reset every bone of the torso, wouldn't you? (Whilst keeping the legs running.)

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i guess resetting the torso would work but you would have to do it seperately for every bone in the torso.

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But it seems that a "bones scene" is just an animation sequence.

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yes, i think it's just an animation sequence which uses bones.

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2) Regarding the blending, I know it will look better, but do you think it is/will be easier to implement?

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i think it works exactly like with vertex animation but it will be easier to achieve good results...

Thanks again for the replies, Ventilator. I have just ordered the A6 Com upgrade, and received the latest beta in my e-mail, so I hope to check out bones for myself in the next few days provided the order goes through smoothly.

In the meantime, if you would like another model to play around with in the A6 beta other than the Chuacha model, let me know, as I've just prepared this model ready for import into A6 with bones:



It's pretty ugly and low-poly, and the vertex assignments are ugly too, but it should be fine just for testing out bone functions like ent_animate(). I have it in MilkShape ASCII format for anyone who wants to play with bones on a human figure in the new beta (though obviously it means adding animation yourself in MED).

Thanks again,
Keith

i hope you will receive your order soon! it's good to have more testers for a6's new bone animation features.