CC - Chris Hecker wants examples of bad animation!

[Cyrus]

http://www.spore.com/sporepedia#qry=srch-maxischecker%3Asast-500000030628

Chris Hecker (the lead programmer for procedural animation in Spore) wants examples of broken animation for debugging purposes. 

Tag your creature with "breakprocanim" and Maxis will search for creatures with that tag and take a look at them.  It might be useful in the description of the creature to describe what's going wrong.

The more feedback you can give the team, the better they can make the final product in September!

[Doomsday]

Broken how? I can break the animation in all sorts of ways. Disjointed limbs... disappearing details... limbs passing through each other bothers me and should be considered broken (though it's not )

[DarkDragon]

Actually, some of the fins animate pretty badly, like half of what is supposed to stick to the creature comes out of it.

[Granite T. Rock]

Does he mean things like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7seijTW1GHA where collision detection doesn't work or does he mean like when we get graphical artifacts and just plain crazyness?  I somehow got an arm going through the body of a curled up creature I was making and it was doing all sorts of weird stuff.

(Unfortunately the specimin I linked to above told me that it uploaded but I can not find it in the database, so I guess they aren't going to get that one)

[Azriel]

hmmm, I noticed in the demo CC (haven't tried it with the full cc), if you make a creature without legs, if it slithers, it does not look right sometimes, it has a chunk of tail that disappears.  Especially, if you make an L form, were instead of legs it rides a tail.

[HarvesteR]

i tried making a slithering creature today... and it didn't slither at alll... it seemed to float around most of the time and would move very strangely

it was so weird i actually thought the edtor didn't do slithering altogether

[Lurker28]

Collision is not an animation issue, and I doubt will be completely rectified. Make sure you are reporting actual "animation" issues, like the way the slither animations looks...which is usually very poor.

If Halo 3 can not completely fix collision then how the hell is a game like spore with procedural animation going to fix it???

[Zamaza]

There is no collision, at all, with a creature and its body.

The mean like weird things, like a knee all the sudden jumps up above the head or does things it shouldn't.

[Doomsday]

There is no collision, at all, with a creature and its body.

The mean like weird things, like a knee all the sudden jumps up above the head or does things it shouldn't.

I know a real awesome way to do that!

Make a split limb.
Move the split parts as close as they can be without becoming one limb.
Place a mouth between these limbs, but not on the elbow joint.
Make sure it looks like both limbs are holding the head, and then test drive.

It will animate weirdly. Which is said because I wanted both limbs to hold the one head. Apparently a part can only stick to one point at a time.

[Tarious]

this should be stickied.

[Robertbobby91]

yea. If this is the editor, call me unimpressed.
Oh sure, the clay shaping is cool, but it lacks immersion.

[HarvesteR]

i also found some trouble when making tripedal creatures or leg pods... if there's a single hind leg with a back bending knee, it does produce some strange movements where the knee intersects itself because the stride is too big for it's lenght....

it's a small problem... but still... could be improved

oh and just to clarify, collision and self-intersection are 2 completely different things... when a model goes through the ground, it's a collision problem... when an elbow goes through a leg, it's self intersection

the only way to correct self intersection glitches is to improve the animations, because no game that i know of calculates and prevents self intersections, which would require some serious number crunching.... and collisions are a whole different story and it's not what the maxis guys are looking for anyways... not at this moment anyways

Cheers

HarvesteR

[Crowster]

I noticed an error when I tried to make a creature with a trunk, the eyes on top, and the mouth underneath. Kept driving me crazy. The mouth would just kind of slither around the trunk to move, and the eyes would often times drift backwards in a horrible fashion.

Thing is, though, when I went to re-create it just now, I couldn't. The head moved just fine. Then I accidentally created an adorable creature ... even when trying to create something broken, you make something that looks awesome. >_>

[HarvesteR]

yea... the editor is unpredictable... possibly because it's all hand-drawn, so even if you try, you can't make a model that is exactly like another... so it's always a little different, and that can mean the difference between something working or not...

[Robertbobby91]

ah, chaos theory.