CC - Chris Hecker wants examples of bad animation!

[Lippy]

There is really no way you can have a system this open and at the same time have self collision detection while animating.  Doing so would require specs that only a handful of people have.  And even the collision detection you see in other games is faked with limits, and animations being done by hand.  The computer has to figure out the animation, and it has to do it within a second.

As for animation breaking, the problem I see most is making a biped with two arms, and the head get smushed into the chest while walking or doing other animations.  I've had to change around some creatures to fix this problem.   But now that I know they're looking for problems, I can complete one and upload it to show them. 

And at the same time, I am amazed at some of the things it does well.  Simply amazed. 

[Gungnir]

I think by animations, they don't mean walk, but "scared" or "sit" or "flip", and those. I had a creature whose arms would go backwards when he did the scared one...now I just need to find it.

[DarkDragon]

I just uploaded one whose foot freaks out when sitting and dancing xD

[vonboy]

there are now a dozen creatures with this tag. i guess submissions will grow when the word get spread around more.

[Gungnir]

Odd...I uploaded the creature..

At least, i think I did. You just hit the share button, right?

edit: Odd. http://www.spore.com/sporepedia#qry=ast-500001146457%3Asast-500001146457

Doesn't show up when I search it.

[Rabellaka]

yeah... sometimes uploaded creatures to spore.com aren't showing up right away or at all and are getting "lost in cyberspace".  I can't figure out a way to resubmit.

[Allch Chcar]

  Thankfully most of the animation problems I've encountered can be worked around to perform better. It seems the editor has more power and freedom than the animation has ability. Singing breaks most creatures due to the "head" pulling back into an unnatural angle.

  My lil bro created a tall big headed creature and when I maxed the spine segments out for him, it ended up displaying a broken flat spot whenever the creature would turn it's head. The only way to get it to stop was reduce the size of all nearby spine segments except for the one the mouth was attached to. He didn't care, so I left the creature as he created it. He'd only look at the picture from now on anyway. At least it still looked the way he wanted it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTKJncbIyBs

Another case I attached a mouth to the end of an arm segment while attaching horns to a pair of arm segments in the middle of the segment. When the thing sang or dance the horns would flail wildly in every direction. When it sang it would pull it's head into it's turtle shaped body. I couldn't get the flailing to stop so I removed it's arms and stuck the mouth straight onto the main body. Annoying, but it fixed it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuOs_7JfphU

I'll link them after I mark them. I really like how the limbs stick together when placed close to the body and another limb. Although it can break the animation, it helped make gave one creature alot more "character." Accidentally cute too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBMfvY1IO9E

[CosmicD]

my lupegator sticks his arms into the ground when being scared, that counts for bad animation right and "spaaider" well, you kiunda see his mouth being detached from his body when he bites

[Bios Revision]

The scared animation never looks right for me, and sometimes the creatures limbs twist up really badly.

I noticed that adding small detail pieces to fat areas seems to make the animation less blobby.

[DaMuncha]

I noticed that If you put a spike on the end of a tail, then dont add legs, it will walk on its tail, but the spike will stay in the air where the tail was.

[MaxisChecker]

Hi, thanks for getting the word out!  I updated my UseMeForMessages guy to be a little more clear about what we're looking for.  I'll quote it here:

"Please tag creatures that animate poorly with 'breakprocanim' so
we can find them.  By poorly, I mean popping, limbs buckling,
extreme jerkiness, parts flying off, bad gait, and that sort of
thing...but not intra-creature penetration/clipping/collision,
meaning legs are allowed to go through each other, etc. You don't
need to send them to me or comment on this guy to report them,
we'll search the database for the 'breakprocanim' tag. Thanks!"

The most useful things to report are "the first thing you tried that didn't work", if that makes sense.  It's great that players can and do usually work around any wonkiness before they share their creatures, but that makes it hard to see if we missed something that trips people up when they first start out.  Obviously anybody trying to break it will be able to do so pretty easily, so those extreme examples aren't as useful unless you find a way that seems nonintuitive (whatever that means for a Spore creature :).  Some problems have been fixed since the CC code was branched, and we still have fixes in the works for ship, but we won't be able to fix everything, so no promises on a given creature, but the examples definitely help us test.

Advanced bug reporting tips for the highly motivated:  If you find a way to break it, try to make the simplest creature that will cause the problem.  Save and don't lose the original "repro case" (the creature that reproduces the problem) in case you accidentally fix it and can't get it to break again, but try to take as many parts and limbs and extra stuff off while still having it break, that makes it easier for us to see what's going on.  Mention the animation(s) it breaks on (use the names on the tooltips, also the ones in edit mode), or if it's the gaits, mention that.  Also, if you can make a small change to the guy and it fixes the problem, note that, and maybe upload and tag the related fixed guy, and name him blah_fixed or whatever and mention him in the comments, and we'll find him.  Finally, its really easy to snow us under.  You guys outnumber us by a fair margin, so look at the existing breakprocanim creatures and see if there's already an example of the breakage you found, and if you see a "dupe" then don't bother uploading your version unless it's a substantially simpler repro or something.  Sometimes it's hard to tell if it's the same failure case, so when in doubt, upload him, but try to dedupe as much as you can so we don't spend too much time deduping.  Remember, when it comes to bug reports, it's all about quality instead of quantity, separating signal from noise takes time, and time is running short!  :)

Edit:  Oh, and if you can upload a video of the breakage to youtube and put a link in the creature comments, that's incredibly useful as well.  Saw a few people doing that already, great idea!

Thanks for helping out, back to the coding,
Chris

[Rct2mad]

Okay Chris thanks for the news 
Uploaded one of mine btw (under the name of Rct2mad I think).

[Necrox]

I'll get right on it when I get home tonight!

Have you seen the issue where scared make long-armed creatures fly all the way to the back rather than curl up on the front? I'm wondering if that's the kind of thing you want. I'm going to reproduce it for you later but for now my creature "Buggy" has it. He's been tagged.

[Yossitaru]

The scared animation, from what I've seen across a few creature's I've made, is that the hands try to "lock" on to the mouth, then an eye. It's particularity troublesome when the hand's default position is not only below the mouth, but also in front/behind it, then it goes to the "nearest" eye. Nearest seeming to be nearest to the hand's position from the mouth.



Something's a bit off there...

[Slife]

Am I the only one amused that ChrisHecker is the animation CHecker?