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Any of you more experienced animators for SWBF2 know how many frames a walk/sprint cycle should be animated in? I checked the docs, but of course there was no info there and I saw nothing on Secret Society.

I know that saber attack anims are 10;10;20 frames for First,Second and Final attacks. So I think it might be around 10-30 frames, but I wanted to ask first.

On a good note, I have a custom Unit skeleton exporting correctly with no errors in both the mesh, or basepose, and I'm working on the tutorial.

it says somewhere in i think the SWBF1 mod tools docs how many fps the games animations were made in XSI so all you should need to do is set it to that and just go with it cause it should play at the same speed you export from XSI. i need to reinstall XSI cause i was gonna tell you a way to stretch an animation by grabbing the final keyframe and moving it but i forgot off the top of my head. but you could do that if its too fast or too slow in game and just re-export.

EDIT: the only thing that MIGHT throw you off is if your running either integrated graphics or a very old card in which your monitor refresh rate is slow and it appears that the speed is right but its just playing slowly cause of your video card and in game it turns out faster that it appeared. you just have to kinda test it a few times. i think for some walkers i made but never got working all the way right i had them at like 30-35 frames for a looping walk animation. remember though you need more than just that one walk cycle, theres also idle to left foot and also right and also vice versa to have a full walking character.

VF501 wrote:I know that saber attack anims are 10;10;20 frames for First,Second and Final attacks.

If you want to see how many frames Pandemic made their character animations then use these console commands:

BF2 Jedi Creation.doc wrote: anim.show
- toggles on and off display of the animation(s) that the player character’s legs and upper body are playing, the total length of the animation (in frames) as well as the current frame number, and the percentage of blending out of the last animation. ESPECIALLY useful with:
slowmo [number] (e.g. "slowmo 5")
- The number is the number of times slower to play the entire game…um…it’s the denominator in the speed, so if you say "slowmo 5" then the game plays at 1/5 speed, if you say "slowmo 2" then it plays at ½ speed, etc. "slowmo" by itself, or "slowmo 1" turns it off. Note that you can also speed up gameplay with "slowmo .2" or "slowmo .5", but this has no practical use for animation debugging. After inputting a "slowmo", turn off the console and check your character for bugs or animation pops.

minilogoguy18 wrote:i need to reinstall XSI cause i was gonna tell you a way to stretch an animation by grabbing the final keyframe and moving it but i forgot off the top of my head. but you could do that if its too fast or too slow in game and just re-export.

Hold shift then left click and drag in the timeline to select your keys then middle click and drag near the end of the selection to shrink or stretch them.
http://softimage.wiki.softimage.com/xsi ... meline.htm

As far as i know, 20 is the maximum. Everything lower can be used. I say fred use different numbers, not only 10 or 20. Pluse the speed the anim is played is also affected by what anim it is. Make your anim with the maximum frames, see what it does, and try something else if not correct (Note that jedi can have their anims played faster or slower through combo)

Basicly you could have one frame for an anim, i used the basepose for all anims not done yet when creating a new animbank.. Worked fine!

For the saber attacks, Gogie gave the info in this thread http://www.gametoast.com/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=16044 on how to do custom saber animations. Which is where I got the 10;10;20 for the First, Second and Final Attack, considering most saber combos are 1, 2 then the final hit.

I was wondering about walk cycles because it is a looping animation and I know that 30 Frames is usually, not always counted as 1sec Real time. So I figured it should be between 10-30 frames.

From what Mandrek has said, I'll start with 20 frames because a walk is slower than an attack in terms of speed.

Walkers don't have a true looping walk animation, they have a sequence of animations that blend together when walking to give the appearance of a single looping animation ingame, to create this in XSI you could make a complete walk cycle then split it up where it needs to be and export these animations separately and they should flow seamlessly when walking.

Notes
imp_walk_atst animation states (the following images only display the 1st frame)
walk_leftfoot_rightfoot - 21 frames walk_rightfoot_leftfoot - 21 frames death01 - Starts from the basepose and falls down - 161 frames idle - Looping stand still animation - 61 frames idle_to_leftfoot - Starts from idle state to raise left foot - 16 frames idle_to_rightfoot - Starts from idle state to raise right foot - 16 frames leftfoot_to_idle - Starts left foot raised and moves to idle state - 31 frames rightfoot_to_idle - Starts right foot raised and moves to idle state - 31 frames turnl - Starts in idle state and turns left - 21 frames turnr - Starts in idle state and turns right - 21 frames
Notes:
from imp_walk_atst.odf

if i could get my XSI working (i reformatted) i could render a video of an at-pt model that i have fully animated but for some reason i cant get it to show in game, i think its falling through the terrain. =/ to make the animations seamless like stated above just do everything in a single scene all in a flowing order and then split them up.

Since when are we talking about walkers? I thought VF501 meant unit sprint anims..

No worries mate, you still have to create a walk cycle either way, it's all relevant.
If we have to then we'll use this topic for unit animation discussion and make another for walker discussion.

Yup, true... I've discovered tons of things about walkers too.. If someone wants to know, Ill post it later. It basicly says the droideka can't be replaced by new skel, and the ATAT can VERY HARDLY be replaced or have new anims, plus i found out most vehicle anims are hardcoded in a way, which means replace ALL anims, but also match with the requirements made by the engine for that specific type of walker

Here's a video I came across on YouTube about how to animate a walking spider, this could be useful reference when creating animations for a Crab droid or something similar.


http://youtu.be/GtHzpX0FCFY

This is really making me want to learn how to animate (which I have actually done before, but not quite in a 3d view), but NOOOOOoooo!!!, 5.11 doesn't wanna run!

Any way I can get my hands on that file you've seemed to have acquired with the at-st animations?

Endless Reference on YouTube has a bunch of videos outlining walk/run/jog etc cycles.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU ... Yg3i10gTdQ

4-legged walk cycle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5GvEmn_wB4