ARMA 3 development blog & reveals

[PuFu]

dude.... I dont know but do you think all 6 Mrd people in this world move the same? no. Just record 8 people doing the same thing and you have 8 different moves. Make them the same speedendpoint and still 8 different..
use your phantasie, I have no energy to teach you that.

son, firstly, this is the wrong thread for that.
secondly, you obviously have no idea what it would mean, in terms of workload, to record 8 different people, through ALL the needed different animations. Not even counting here the fact that you can't currently randomize the animation from a given pool/array.
You over simplify things here, and one of the main reason why you do it is because you, obviously, have little to no idea about it. That's ok.

Maybe you have some better ideas for animation diversity then?

In theory, the best practice i can think of, is having 2 animations, then morph them together with different percentages. That, obviously, is a lot easier said than done, because those mocap anims "should" overlap perfectly on the timeframe, which is very hard to do iRL.
Another thing that i can think is the actual height of the avatar, that could be directly linked to the animations speed for most movement ones. You then only need one animation for each action, but if the height of 2 people is slightly different, you just won't notice that it is the same thing.

I am just curious, is it so hard to record Animations? Maybe yes. But why? I must say that I am a complete ordinary person. Never did this or read a developers blog about it either.

figured that out on my own.

Recording in a mocap studio means about 1-3hours of adjusting the setup for the anims prior to recording per say, which means one should take full advantage of the guy in the black suite. Moreover, those anims that got recorded need to be manually cleaned afterwards (ranging from anywhere from 5 mins to 1h), as they are never perfect, no matter how high res the cameras are.
It is a costly and lengthy thing to do.

here is a little read for you:
http://www.bistudio.com/english/comp...animation-lead

[Smookie]

Recording in a mocap studio means about 1-3hours of adjusting the setup for the anims prior to recording per say, which means one should take full advantage of the guy in the black suite. Moreover, those anims that got recorded need to be manually cleaned afterwards (ranging from anywhere from 5 mins to 1h), as they are never perfect, no matter how high res the cameras are.
It is a costly and lengthy thing to do.

Plus they need to be aligned with the poses ingame, worked out for the gameplay issues, tested against both 3rd Person view and 1st Person view, reworked, readjusted, realigned, fixed etc.etc. You can imagine one could waste a week on a single animation (one [1] file!). And there are a really tons of files to go through.

If you wish higher diversity (8 animations instead of 1...), you would need X times as many animators as the whole BI crew probably to finish them, especially for RV engine, in a reasonable time.

As for transitions, if you read the interview again, you will notice these are being worked on. The transitions handled by animations would lag the controls making it it even more clunky and unresponsive (tested even in ArmA2) so they should be rather engine-side enforced (so definately not animators job).

BTW robo feel: The camera which is sticked to the back will always make it look artificial. I bet that if you sticked a third person camera (arma style) to BF3 animations, you would also find them unpleasant after certain period of time.

Again, remember all anim feedback is collected and reflected upon (unless it's pure trolling) so "not gonna change coz they no listen last time" is not valid when i am around

[tremanarch]

Okay. NVM then. I did not know how much work is needed. I guess one set of Aniamtions will do then It is better to have one tight and good loooking set than 2 or three not so good looking anyway!

[Dragonshot]

I can still vividly remember the first time I seen these animations -



those animations blew my mind!, no kidding I must have replayed that video at least a hundred times. I'm amazed at all the bitching going on here about the animations in Arma3, I personally feel like we are being treated with excessive indulgence.

[4 IN 1]

One question remain: will stance changing while holding binoculars be fix?

I can still vividly remember the first time I seen these animations -

[YOUTUBE]7uUeqkKw1Ec[YOUTUBE]

those animations blew my mind!, no kidding I must have replayed that video at least a hundred times. I'm amazed at all the bitching going on here about the animations in Arma3, I personally feel like we are being treated with excessive indulgence.

Not Magpul enough

[Dingo8]

I'm amazed at all the bitching going on here about the animations in Arma3, I personally feel like we are being treated with excessive indulgence.

I agree; A substantial amount of the community reminds me of this person: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DgN2Bs4Tzc


What's worse is a lot of the stuff complained about will probably be resolved in the release version.

[SaBrE_UK]

As for transitions, if you read the interview again, you will notice these are being worked on. The transitions handled by animations would lag the controls making it it even more clunky and unresponsive (tested even in ArmA2) so they should be rather engine-side enforced (so definately not animators job).

The only major animation/transition issue I think exists is how quickly the characters accelerate and decelerate. Aiming at an enemy who is sprinting horizontally who then stops dead just feel completely wrong, similarly one who is stopped dead then proceeds to reach 12mph instantly kills it, too. In your opinion can it be fixed without having animations tied to movement rather than movement tied to animations like in games like CoD/BF3? Their downfall is having feet sliding all over the place when changing direction or speed etc., which Arma on the other hand, nails.

[Minoza]

I can still vividly remember the first time I seen these animations -


those animations blew my mind!, no kidding I must have replayed that video at least a hundred times. I'm amazed at all the bitching going on here about the animations in Arma3, I personally feel like we are being treated with excessive indulgence.

Actually, animations are pretty good, even awesome I'd say, but the system beneath, the way they work when coupled together is what should be improved. The system should allow that they work together in a nice fluid manner.

[tremanarch]

it is only the unarmed Animation that looks so strange. Animations of Weapon holding soldiers look really good!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHqB1...=youtube_gdata

http://s14.directupload.net/images/120510/srfp2dkl.jpg (122 kB)

Normally soldiers and civilists in a war arent jogging instead they are running for their lives so you could say when running for your life you put more energy in the Animation. Maybe not so much. A little less might be okay too.

[PurePassion]

it is only the unarmed Animation that looks so strange. Animations of Weapon holding soldiers look really good!

http://s14.directupload.net/images/120510/srfp2dkl.jpg (122 kB)

Here is a preview of the WiP unarmed soldier animation. I have to say it looks rather brilliant The arms are more angled and don't reach as far back as in Arma 2 and the fingers are animated as well. A problem I see is in the old animations are e.g. the transitions from walking to crouching in the lower stance.