Will we be seeing any of that. Like normally capes are animated so they move around and such. And wings also. But, what about other parts. Like will the hair move around. If ya have long hair will it flow in the wind. Will the bow on the outfit have a little movement. If you are wearing a backpack that has a small satellite dish on it will the dish rotate looking for a signal. Will the jewel eyes of your amulet have a little sparkle or light up or glow in low light. If we have a tube visible out of our arm, will we see fluid flowing through it. Will my character actually blink their eyes and not just have wide open eyes all the time. O.O . Even the toons in wow blink. Least I remember they do.
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Owner and Big Sister of the Justice Girls -Champions Online-City of Titans-
Forum Breaker
Leader of the Ellysyn Dark Ensemble
Tricky to do with clipping issues (Why we *never* got Ghost Widow's hair).
Still, I want my Mecha wings back! :(
The plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces are called Aglets; their true purpose is sinister.
Some animations are easy and independent of the overall character's movement (like the backpack with a rotating radar)
Others can make adding new animations downright nightmarish (capes, flowing hair, etc).
- If you're doing the animations through code, you run the risk that the code won't work well for a new animation- it'll clip the leg, cut through the body as you walk backward, mess with the arms, or just not "flow right" around the body as you'd expect it to in real life.
- If you're doing these manually, then you have to consider how they'll animate for every new animation you'll add in the future, and since each item may be different, it makes addiing more animations more time-consuming, potentially affecting what can be made on budget.
Personally, I'm rather tolerant of clipping and the occasional visual screwup if it means it works well in the situations where it would be most recognized, but others have very different opinions on this.
Maybe we can try adding this kind of hair.
[img=650x878]http://www.paultosca.com/dominancewar/vgh/vgh_final03.jpg[/img]
Even have Physics on some of the planes.
[img]http://www.paultosca.com/dominancewar/vgh/vgh_hair_geo.gif[/img]
Yea... seems it uses tricks like Normal maps and height maps to make the strands look like they stand out, have dimension, but the hair is really flat on the planes. :/
Link to tutorial: http://www.paultosca.com/varga_hair.html
While the hair looks neat, it does seem to add a lot of polygons that are unnecessary unless you spend a lot of time close up.
Also, I'm with Chase on clipping of capes and so on. I'd like to spitball the idea of a setting for the level/type of animation. Like Batman's shrouds him when he stands still, Thor's lifts majestically, and Spawn's crawls and whirls around him. I'm not looking for anything huge, just a little more flavor. And obviously, a low priority. Give me a cape that sways slightly, cuts through my thighs when I run backwards and I'll still be happy. :D
And then there's the problem that no 'real' hair looks like that, or acts like that. You've got 'hair' in that bundle that can't even be connected to the head.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Well CoH gave us animated capes, wings and tails so at the very least I'd expect the same from this game. I could accept that some of those things might not be ready by the time the game launches, but I would think it would not be too long after launch before all those things are in place. As far as things like blinking eyes, backpack radar dishes or animated hair go again I would not be upset if those things are not around when the game launches, but I would hope they are at least on the "let's eventually try to get them into the game" list.
And you can also count me in on the "some amount of clipping is acceptable" vote. I can understand why the Devs of CoH were hyper-conservative when it came to item clipping because they didn't want to put up with all the people "whining" about it. But the downside to that was that there were many costume item combos that actually probably would have looked acceptable despite a small amount of clipping. I'd rather have the freedom to decide for myself if things look "bad" or "good" rather than let the Devs arbitrarily make all those decisions for me. Obviously I'd like the Devs of CoT to eliminate major clipping problems, but hopefully they'll be a little more lax on the issue overall.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Just a little bit of bounce to the hair as a character walks adds a lot to the realism, it's on par with making the eyes blink.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
Yea I don't necessarily want to see this elaborate hair animation. But at least to see it bounce or wave a little would be nice. I don't want to feel like I'm wearing Lego Hair. o.o;; If you have a pony tail then it should at least move a bit when ya running. Or if ya select the hair that you want to drop down the front, it could have a tendency to move to the back and sway or something and when you stop the hair sort of slides back to the front or something. So not asking for the 1080p of animations. Just something that gives the toon some more life to their whole look. Wearing a Earth/rock costume chest piece and see pieces of it maybe fall from ya body or floating around you. Not an aura in itself though. Animation that is specific to the costume piece.
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Owner and Big Sister of the Justice Girls -Champions Online-City of Titans-
Forum Breaker
Leader of the Ellysyn Dark Ensemble
the problem is that the "little animations" are not that much simpler than the complex ones. Take hair.
You could try to use the tech that works for things like "jiggle physics" and apply it to hair. It'd basically be an automated,weighted response to the movement around it. I'd work good for that wobble of hair when you run, jump, or stop suddenly, but it's going to become more and more obvious in the longer hairstyles and pony tails.
You can also use some of the graphics-card-available elements that often provide ribbon effects. EQ2 had a braided hairstyle that used this and worked ok. At the beginning, it clipped htrough the body and out the mouth when you ran backwards (these elements don't use any sort of collision tracking) but they eventually changed it to have so much natural "blow back" that when you ran backwards, it just got lost inside the body.
There's also real animated rigs. These give you the best appeal, but you're essentially choosing an animation for the hair to play with every physical animation. Do a round-house kick and your ponytail might wrap around you. Jump down and it may stream above you. sprint sideways and it sways to the side. The challenge here is every time you add a new animation, you'd need to decide which hair animation is appropriate for it-- for the various different animation sets. You usually dramatically cut down on the hair sets or you cut down on the extra animations to make this viable.
I'd LIKE these to be in as early as possible, but I'm doubting it or expecting a limited range of options, at best. CoH didn't have wings until issue 8. it didn't have ANIMATED tails until Issue 17. MWM will be doing things differently, obviously, but I'm curbing my expectations as their budget is notably less than Cryptic's original budget-- volunteer work only go so far to make up for that
Come on, the real reason you want this is for boobs right? Come on, just say it!
-Bodai
Actually, this post did make me thing of the boob-bounce in Neverwinter Nights.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
And thus, there is balance in the force ;-)
Well ... balance between Left and Right, I should hope ... even if that is a counter-balance when in motion ...
Wait, we weren't talking about ball bearings hanging from strings on a desk top toy?
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Well, I'm not an animator, but if they decide to get a volunteer group together for that project, I'll be glad to assist in the research! :D
Tsk-tsk. Everyone knows that the REAL work of the ... um ... [i]heavy lifting[/i] ... has to be done by QA, not the research group ...
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]