IK made official and timeline for bones

The IK tool floating around that everyone knows about should be a part of construct. it's just the kind of 'wow, I can't believe I don't have to bother doing this' thing that construct is all about. if it could be integrated with bones and ragdolls eventually, where you can name bones and turn the into animation ragdoll and ik mode, that would obviously rule..

also, this next one I'm not expecting to be possible, at least not anytime soon, but I would've said the same about bones period, or the physics behavior before I saw they were included, so here goes.. the main reason I haven't used bones, is because there's no timeline I can scrub back and forth, and visualize what I'm doing. without previews either, it becomes very cumbersome if you're trying to make a high quality animation. maybe it's because I have some digital animation background and I'm spoiled by animation software, but pressing preview before I can see how 100 frame speed going into 30 frame speed is going to look for some arm moving animation, makes the process much more technical than artistic. and since I'm making ridiculous requests, an easy-in-ease out feature for the keyframes where it starts faster, and slows down or vice versa would be nice, too.

but yeah, mainly, the easy one. that ik tool floating around should really be built into .99

And another thing

the ik tool when integrated should allow you to adjust the angle where it locks and won't bend backward, and remove it altogether, that way it can be used to make tails and robot joints, and snakes, etc

even with an ik tool, making a snake wouldnt be a good idea at least with the triangle solving method. it would look weird.

i was working on something else thats ikish which would work for that, i used it in evolution game for the worm, but i never found a way to keep the root of the ik in place.

ps, i think someone made an ik plugin, its in the pluginswtvforum. i dont use it tho cause i havnt worked on any ik stuff in a while, so i never really tried it out much.

yeah, thats the one im talking about. its very easy to use, and i think it or something like it should be built into the next version. at first i thought it was awkward that it was an object with one action instead of a behavior, but it works out perfectly. now if i need to apply ik to 50 different objects, only some of the time, i dont have to keep enabling/disabling it or adding the behavior repeatedly. not having to bother with creating an ik function i have to keep calling, or learn python script got me from scratch to biped animation synthesis in a few hours, totally convenient, quick, and awesome like the rest of construct, so i think it should be part of it....besides, ive already seen several posts pointing people to it. it seems to be in demand,probably even more if more newcomers had ik explaind to them in a wiki...ill find the link later and post it here in case anyone wonders what im talking

hmm, i might consider making an ik tutorial, since i have all kinds of ik junk lying around

and what in the world is:

biped animation synthesis

it's the same kinda thing you were doing with your ik walker thingy.

animation synthesis is where animation is generated on the fly

a biped is something with 2 legs

so far, the animation synthesizer can create realistic animations for the legs based on speed, meaning if you set it to slow, it walks realistically, and as it gets faster, the animation becomes more and more like running. all you adjust is the speed. it's eventually going to automatically create animation on the fly based on variations in the height of the terrain, on fatigue, being influenced by outside forces, such as being pushed, and compensating for the lack of balance, push and pulling objects of various weights, slipping, etc. natural motion has the euphoria engine which does the same kinda thing:

http://naturalmotion.com/files/Sig_05_Reel_Web_Large.avi

it's pretty awesome stuff

i almost forgot about my walker. hehe.

good luck with it! i started to make the terrain solver and thats where things started to get hard, the legs need to find alot of information to make the right choice, or else theyll clip through stuff like no tmmrw.

maybe post a cap of it? sounds interesting to see what youve done, we could maybe even work on a method of doing this together. i havnt worked on any complicated stuffz in a while.

thanks quazi

this is just the barebasics here

more of a proof of concept than anything

so not quite as refined as it will be, totally alpha

I'm in the middle of starting from scratch to make it more flexible and reusable

at this point it seems I'm going to need to make a separate animation package (using construct for this too) to save and load files to be used with the system

that will also serve as a test ground to test out physics and such

this new version isn't even walking yet, but it's already reaching a level of complexity where I'm going to need to work it out on paper first. I don't want to finish a whole walker, only to realize that when I want to add more characters on the screen I'm totally lost. I have to make sure that adding limbs to anything doesn't require any extra coding, other than loading the animation and physics properties. exciting times, though.

also, for those who want the ik tool I originally posted about, it's at this link:

http://www.scirra.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3078&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=ik+solver

hmm, id like to see a cap if you dont mind, the moblur runs really slow on my pc, plus an exe doesnt really tell me anything.

you dont need to be so protective of your work, after all you did get this idea from a cap i posted.

did you use beziers to animate it? or something different?, and what do you mean by animation package?

making the thing walk is by far the hardest part. you need to find out where hip placement should be, and thats one of the hardest parts to make it look good. you also need a terrain solver, which is real processy.

the application i built my walker for was only meant to be used on the main character, since its really heavy. the other enemies would be only a bare bones version with simple terrain solving and such.

you dont need to be so protective of your work, after all you did get this idea from a cap i posted.

no disrespect, but I didn't get the idea from a cap you posted

I've had it for quite some time, even before I heard of the euphoria engine

what I did get from the cap you posted, however, was the realization it would be worth trying in construct, so thank you for that

another thing I got from the cap you posted was from watching the exe itself, not looking through the cap

but the idea that hips should move based on when the feet intersected the ground and that the motion curve shouldn't be limited to the reach of the limbs, so thanks for that, too

but perhaps you're right, at least at this point I shouldn't be so protective

honestly though, as this project progresses, I will be more protective, I eventually plan to sell my finished product

I don't think it's too crazy not to want it to be open source

here's the cap for that:

you may notice some disabled controls, or missing conditions and such, that's because I stripped it down in the end when I realized I'd be starting from scratch, and I just wanted it to be able to prove the walking running thing to me, and how feasible it is

I didn't even finish making the ground detection, as you'll notice the height of the character changes as the speed does

did you use beziers to animate it? or something different?, and what do you mean by animation package?

I used an ellipse. the new version will be two cubic bezier curves, one for the forward motion, one for the back. I want to be able to adjust the animation for a wide variety of scenarios, and I want it to be able to change based not only on terrain, but other outside influences.

as for the animation package. I originally had controls on the feet to adjust the length, width, and position of the ellipse, and the position of the hips, and the direction the torso was pointing, which made it obvious you could get nice animation for anything from pushing pulling heavy objects, crouch walking, long jumping, creeping, even swimming, just by adjusting those controls. but just to get walking and running to automatically blend based on speed, I had to tweak numbers, run it again, tweak speed conversions, run it again. it would have been faster if I had text on the screen at runtime that told me all the settings as I tweaked them, but still wouldn't be fun to have to enter everything into the program manually. aside from that, I realized it would be ridiculously annoying to do similar thing with other motions you might want to make, such as punching and such, if you wanted them to be bezier controlled, and flexible.

the animation package is going to be a separate program that will have a timeline. you go to frame 20, move everything where you want it go to frame 30, do that there, and it will tween for you. you'll be able to tweak the speed with a bezier curve, meaning if the animation should speed up as it's going from position 1 to position 2, you'll be able to adjust the rate of acceleration deceleration. mainly though I want it for animation loops and transitions. so you can create this walking animation, create the running animation, create a crouching animation, a jumping, a pushing, a pulling, etc, and give them all parameters and ranges. so walking and running is one animation that varies, the parameter will be speed,

jumping will still have this same speed parameter, but the added parameters of where a jump can start (probably a foot on ground type thing) , pushing and pulling will have a weight parameter, etc. you'll be able to test blending between one animation and the other, and test out physics, if I can get that to work well. you export the file, and load it into construct. then in construct you use private variables to control all those parameters, and the animations themselves will be automated for you. I also want the saved animation file to contain any other important information, like what sprite sizes to use for the model, how many limbs, character names, etc.

as far as the terrain solver and slowness. I guess I'll be feeling those headaches soon enough

I have a few ideas I hope will work, though, I guess we'll see

as a last resort though, I wouldn't be too disappointed if I had to have premade types of terrain, that vary in height only at certain distances.

edit: lol my response with the exe being posted at 3:52 am.