So, I never worked on animating stuff for now, but I already put this thing on the round table to reflect on it in advance.
This is about making characters perfectly walk stairs steps and open doors handles, realisticly, with no “foot in the air” or “just pushing doors with the Force”.
This kind of details have been introduced in GTA IV for example, but I would need something perfect, " real-life-like".
I would need to make my characters do these things 1) automatically at best when it comes to walking stairs 2) manually AND contollable concerning doors, meaning : hold an “open” button to take the handle, then move back freely to open the door.
All clues from experienced programmers and animators will be appreciated.
Since you have no experience with animating - suggest just learning about animation first - without the restriction of ‘realism’.
Realism is something VERY experienced developers are working on - and have dedicated tons of hours into getting somewhat realistic results.
Look into some of the awesome animation/character controllers currently on the asset store which have had some extensive R&D work done on getting characters to act and interact in a realistic manner.
Agreed. To do what you’re describing is quite difficult. If you’re talking about 3D models in a 3D world, then the standard approach is to use inverse kinematics, which figures out what angle the joints should be at to get the limb endpoint (hand or foot for example) where you want it (e.g., floor or doorknob). But even that’s only the first step; to climb stairs you have to also change the gait, and to open a door you have to step back as you pull on the door handle, etc.
All this is quite a lot of work, and requires animators and programmers to work closely together (or to be one Super Munchkin-style programmer/animator whiz). I don’t recommend you tackle it as your first project.
In 2D, things are a bit easier, as you can get by with lots of well-done hand-drawn animations. One of my favorites is still Prince of Persia, which had amazingly fluid animation as the character climbs, jumps, hangs from ledges, etc. All it requires is Disney-level animators and (again) a lot of time coding up triggers and states.
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Wow, okay. I didn’t thought it would be so serious already.
I’ll take a look at kinematics just to try to understand how it would work.
Thanks.