Reality Factory

As revealed in the 2.1 SDK for Half-Life, in a deathmatch situation the engine maps two seperate animations onto any running or walking player model: the "action" animation (firing, holding a gun), mapped to the upper body, and the "gait" animation (walking, running, idle), mapped to the lower body. It does this by running through the hierarchy of the model, first assigning the current frame of the action animation to the entire skeleton, and then overwriting the lower body (in memory, at the current engine tick) with the lower body gait animation.

would it be possible to do this for the player or pawns in rf. i am not sure how i would go about it but it would surely save time in my animation work.
also, in one of the earlier versions of the ragdoll physics demo there was a command that allowed you to rotate and adjust the orientation of any specific bone on a model through scripting. what would i have to do to get this to work with the current rf release that i am using.

thanks,
fps

federico would undoubtedly be the best to answer this. I sent hi man email with a link to this thread. Hopefully he'll get a chance to drop by.

Okay, I tried his other email address from his website. The first one failed. Fingers crossed!

i do belive that this is a different type of animating than what rf uses, how ever there may be a work around, having the top half completely seperate from the bottom half, and like weapons, attatching the top half to a bone in the second half, it might be an idea to ask jay as he has done work with weapon slots, it will defenetly be possible if guns can have their own animation in rf, i havnt tried that yet so i dont know if its possible

I would not use weapons as they always mirror the animation of the 'main body'. However you could use DynamicEntities (or StaticEntityProxys without collision) to always mirror the animation of the main body - but in some cases you might want a different animation. For this to work you need the script to run in low level.

I mean it this way: upper body is the pawn, lower body is the SEP/DynEntity. They should have the same skeleton and have the same animations. And then always when you set a new Animation, you also set the Animation of the lower body. Like this:

Animate(SHOOT);
AnimateEntity(WALK, self.EntityName # "_lower", false);

But problem is, because those are different actors, the animations can look pretty weird, because it could be that they don't match to each other.

I personally think with all the trouble you get with adjusting the animations to each other, you could just make one actor and then have animations like "walk_shoot", and this would be faster. (Instead of trying to make "walk" (lower body) match with "shoot","idle","use","look"(upper body). This is really much more work.)

I knew there'd be folks to help out on this. That's what this place is all about.

The idea above made me think. What about having an upper body as the parent and the lower as the child. Might that work?

Having the upper part as the parent and the lower as the child was exactly what i meant. With the problem i meant this:



The picture shows a Slash and a Run animation in one.
As you can (hopefully) see, parts of the model seem to be missing, which comes from the two seperated actors.

What about the bone commands from the rag doll demo??
It was used in the shooting command of pawns. there were no shoot animations, instead thee recoil was simulated by rotating the arm upward when the player shot. mabey i could have a run shoot animation that turns the legs to the direction of movement. i am using a system of player models having the same animations of pawn models and there is a lot of animations and therefore it thakes up a lot of space. if i could minimise this that would be alsome. (also i really am not a great animator and milkshape gives me a lot of trouble)

Thanks,
fps