Shifty Geezer said:
Anyway, what mckmass is talking about is using physics based skeleton motion to simulate natural motion the way it actually works. You have a skeleton of interconnecting limbs and the forces you apply on limbs affect the position and forces of other limbs. eg. In existing mocap animation you can record a character in a punch with full upper body movement that connects with the opponent, and another punch that the opponent dodges and the fighter's weighthas to shift to compensate. You can potentially tween between the two. The idea of physical modelling is you don't have key-frames but apply force to limbs with various constraints and parameters like friction.
Interesting stuff. If you look at the beautiful animation in Shadow of the Colossus, they apparently use a sort of synthesis between tradtional keyframe and physics based reaction/adaption. Obviously its on a much lower scale than something like NaturalMotion in real-time, but perhaps a sign of the future?
One's translation of that watchimpress SotC article had some neat tidbits on it.
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#7 Inverse kinematics on colossi
The realtime adaptive walking animation system with IK (Inverse Kinematics) is implemented in the colossi's animation.
Colossus AI is represented as reactions to the player entering particular zones. Those reactions are not created by programmers but by designers with a collosi scripting software.
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/...207/3dwa73.htm
When a colossus walks, it calculates the direction and distance of movement from the AI. The basic walking animation is designed by hand, and footsteps are adjusted to the actual landscape by IK. The player character and the horse also get scene feedback by IK.
#8 Physics motion and Add Motion
When the player sticks to a colossus, he is shaken by physics simulation of 2 pendulums for the player's hand-to-bust and waist-to-foot (multiple pendulum simulation). Besides spring pendulum simulation is applied to elastic hands.
However, only with those simulations it became inorganic, so they added human motion designed by hand to the result of this simulation. They call it "Add Motion" system.
But even with those 2 factors some glitchs occured.
Then they added IK to them and finally created the natural motion made of 3 synthesized factors which can create actions that both programmers and designers have never seen before. This system is used not only against the player but in the motion of the horse on which the player is riding on.
