Okay, this is the last bug I have on my animations and skeleton now, and i cannot find the cause of it.

What is happening is that in-game whenever I go to move forwards there is a slighty moment where instead i move backwards, after that then it moves forwards just fine.

The problem is that jump doenst happen in nifskope, and i cant enable movement in the CS so i cant see it there. As far as i can see it should be working fine, excpt for this little stutter at the start of them.

I cant explain it fully, so i put together a video of it. Notice the slight hiccup every time i start to move, at the end you can even see as a i just tap the forwards key i can move backwards quite well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvvlpXI1Clw


While Im not going to openly link to the files, if anyone thinks they can help Ill be happy to send you a link

First wild guess: In both NifSkope and the CS, the animations are done "in place" - i.e. the root node does not move. In the game it moves along at the speed of the playe/creature's forward movement because the root node is moved according to the user input.. If the animation has the root node moving incorrectly at the start, the entire animation moves with it in the wrong direction.

Usually you build a walk type animation in the modeller with the root node moving at a constant speed so you can make sure the feet are stationary relative to the ground as the movement happens. If you accidentally got a non-uniform movement of the root node in the build process, then when it moves uniformly in the game, the rest of the skeleton gets the inverse movement applied. I hope that makes sense.

I can't see the video at the moment, but if the entire creature is getting moved backward while it is animating forward that's likely to be the problem. If the animation looks like it's playing backwards and then reversing it would be something else.

i can understand what you are saying here, however...

the movement on the root bone is constant (it only has a start and end value) so it should be constant.

First off, I don't know much about animations in Oblivion, so I could be very wrong.

Is there a noticeable difference between your standing idle and the point where your movement animation starts?
From what I see it's unlikely something wrong per say around the first frame, or this issue would reoccur each motion cycle.
But when the offset between your centaur and the scene root in the first frame is too much different to the offset in the standing idle, the switch from idle to walking could move your centaur away from the scene root before starting the movement.

I've yet to find a movement animation that starts from the idle pose though, so I'm not 100% sure how exactly this works. The few movement animation replacements I found (because I don't have access to the DVD right now and thus the original KFs) don't make much sense to me as there's nothing I could reproduce, they have nothing in common regarding the pose they're starting in, how many full cycles one KF file includes or at which point in the motion it stops and starts over. So I likely don't have any idea of what I'm talking about. But still it looks like some offset issue to me.

Aren't those sideways movements of the Bip01 in a movement animation even starting at a certain offset from the center? Maybe a mistake in this will make them jump back before moving forwards. :shrug:

Well i just checked, my idle is set in the centre, and the movement ones start from the centre.

However, looking at it there is an offset from the centre on the normal human animations, not much but it's there.

for example, the NonAccum bone in the idle animation has -0.0285, -1.5811, 67.3567 . the y value is the one that is effecting me, so prehaps this has something to do with it.

Ill try offsetting my animations tomorrow, as i just packed up as you posted.


EDIT: I just thought, if it was the idle out of place then there would be a similar jump at the end of an animation when you stop moving again....but there isnt.

Hmm, could it be we just can't notice the jump from the end of the motion back to the idle pose, because it's not that large an offset to begin with and a locational interpolation forwards into idle position could easily be misinterpreted as part of the motion itself, while an interpolation backwards into the starting position for the walk clearly can't? Just guessing here though.

edit: And I'm rather suspecting the Bip01 offset mismatch to be in the movement than in the idle. It should be harder to mess up a stationary idle in positioning.
From an idle I only know the issues in rotation, the 90° offset to the rigging pose. All this sideways sliding of a movement animation though is far more troublesome. As I don't know what exactly it's all about and what explicit rules it underlies, it should be way easier to mess up.

actually that was something i found also.

Somehow, the human animations use positive numbers to travel negatively along the y axis, without that 90 degree turn they infact will move backwards as they run in nifskope.


I really dont understand this backward movement and 90° body rotation either, i think my problem might be related to it but it's just weird.

Both nifskope, and the geck animate in motion(can't remember the CS though). but because of the xy rotation accumulation and Z data being handled on the nonaccum it'll do weird stuff in nifskope, like move correctly at the +y but the model will face -x or something. But whatever.

I think you are right about the bip01 y position on the forward anim. if it has any neg value then it'll probably go there on the first frame... it doesn't happen while playing the anim when it reaches the last frame, as its not a looping anim. it'll continuously blend. it probably wouldn't happen when you drop out of the forward either. the bone priority might hold it off from doing that.

the anim doesn't blend very well with the idle atm- the legs jumping immediately to a mid walk position. but you can try fixing that after you sort out that movement issue.

Well Ive been loking at it and all the animations start at 0,0,0 which is the same location as the idle, adding different amonts of translation to the animations really doesnt make that much difference, the problem is still there the entire time.

The blending between the two animations cant be helped really, the vanilla animations do it too, though it way less noticeable. I really dont want ot redesign the entire horse movement, if the done blend right it doesnt bother me too much. This movement issue does though.

Oh an something else for you to think about, if I change the movement values (from negative to positive that makes them go backwards then :shrug:) the jump suddenly goes forward first, then goes backwards as it supposed to. Same thing happens with a backwards animation, goes forward a bit then backwards.

key notes< try using them. That's what they are for, you can probably see some of the beth anims use them :shrug:. it flags particular txt keys to do stuff. one of those is to blend between animations at particular frames, ie it blends the walk to run when the left foot is on the ground in both, so no magically switching feet when transitioning between anims. you can elongate the blending in between animations as well. So it blends over an extra couple of frame. I'm not so sure how that's done, but it can be.

As for the backwards then forward thing. Not sure.

Okay, I went about gather some infomation for you.

1. It does not happen to NPCs.
2. If I set the translation movent on the Bip01 bone in the animation to 0 (eg starts and ends at 0) i dont move at all, but the jump doesnt happen.
3. If i go into first person view then hold the camera button down to view my character the jump doesnt happen as i go forwards/backwards. But camera mode from third person still makes it happen.

Hope that info helps.

anyone have some suggestions?

Take whatever I say with less than a grain of salt since I don't do animations but is it possible that Beth uses certain pre-defined frames in the horse animation? Maybe it isn't an offset issue as much as it is an animation framing issue.

I've been working on figuring out Bow animation (well, morphs) for a while now and it seems they used the 1st few frames for the actual animation but the vast majority of the frames are for an invisible idle sequence.

EDIT: BTW, looks freakin awesome!

LHammonds

Hi da mage,

I finally got round to looking at the latest files you sent me today...I gotz good news (at least from what I saw on my end) and have sent you a PM with a document, and a version of your test mod with some tweaked files.

Koniption

Koniption figured it out, a rotation in the bip01 bones that doesnt do anything (except make my values reverse, so now a positive value means forwards), that when deleted fixed the jumping problem.

:celebration:

lol! glad that was simple enough.

:thumbsup: