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Avatar jumps position when stringing animations together by script


Caliandris Pendragon
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I'm very old in SL terms but very new to making animations and using scripts to control animesh, so please feel free to make any answer simple as you like!

I am trying to program a set of eight animesh figures to go through a series of animations, using a script which Isabell Larnia posted on the comments on reviews for the animesh figures I am using, which allows one to cobble animations together in a sequence.

The problem I have is that in the process of the series of animations the avatar moves forwards and backwards. For most of the animations this works well, but two seem to return the avatar to the start position before they play, and what I want is for the avatar position to remain as it is at the end of the last animation - staying stepped forward or stepped back. Is there any easy way of working that into the script?  I know that with animations the position is calculated relative to the start position of the avatar, but I am not sure how one fixes this in the process of making an animation which is going to run as part of a sequence, when creating the animation or pose. At the moment the script simply triggers the animations and gives no information about starting position etc. Some of them appear to work fine just where the last animation stopped, others jump back to the start position.

Any insight you can give me into what I need to do would be welcome. Ideally I don't want to have to use actual in world co-ordinates to control the movement, simply because I need eight of these animesh figures in a circle and that would be a load of work (and may not even be possible). As you can see, I'm so ignorant of the constraints I'm not even sure if what I want to do can be done without remaking the animations and somehow locking them to a start position.

 

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I guessed there was no quick shortcut to this, but based upon discussions, it would be a very useful tool to be able to string animations together and not have the avatar jumping around (back to base point at the beginning.) The weird thing is that some seem to move smoothly from one to the other without returning to the start point, and I can't work out why they work and others don't. I'm assuming it must be something about the priority maybe? Don't know. It isn't as though they were created to do that as I'm using animations from different animators. If only I could guess why some of them work, it might be easier to make them all work. However, I've decided to cheat and as it is for machinima, I am going to use new copies of the animesh with a different starting position. Swapping them out will be a pain, but it solves the problem, albeit in a clunky way!

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AFAIK animations can't add onto each other except when one is easing out and another is easing in, but that's still going to be a weighted average rather than both at full strength, and it won't persist after the first one ends.

Also, remember that animations are illusions, and each resident watching gets their own personal rendering of that animation on their screens with no synchronization. No real movement happens to the avatar/animesh as far as the server is concerned. That's the other reason snapback happens. The system isn't built to remember "animation #1 moved the fish 2 meters forward".

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Thank you for your reply. I am stringing animations along using a script, and the frustrating thing is that some of them appear to be perfectly happy to use the notional position of the avatar after the last anim and just carry on (I understand what you say about the actual position not having changed) and some aren't. If they *all* snapped back to the original position, it wouldn't be so tantalizing, but they don't. I've been experimenting with making my own poses to see if I can blend it together somehow, and I am having some success at that. But I'm still intrigued to know why some start from the apparent shifted position of the avatar, and others snap back, unless just dumb luck. Fortunately as I am filming the result, I only have to worry about how things appear to my camera and not anyone else.

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4 hours ago, Caliandris Pendragon said:

I'm still intrigued to know why some start from the apparent shifted position of the avatar, and others snap back

If you're playing non-looped animations in a sequence and the animations contain easing, then can happen.

Also, if the next animation in a sequence is not cached in viewer memory and is waiting on CDN download, this can happen.

Not using proper timing to start the next animation can leave gaps where this can happen.

Stopping prior animation then starting next animation instead of starting next animation then stopping prior animation can cause this to happen.

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Animesh doesn't actually move from it's position due to animations. It just appears to. It always thinks it's still in the same place.

What you will need to do is create an amination to "step" between the two. It has to start with the avatar/ animesh in the position the desired matching animation ends in and moves the animesh to the place the next desired animation starts at. Basically create a transition sequence. You can't change an animation once it's uploaded. If it starts with the avatar in the center then that's the way it will always start (not counting for ease in). If it ends with the avatar 9.9 meters away from the center it will always end there.

Ease in is also an issue as it is not repeated in a loop, so you need to take that into account.

SL does not make animation strings easy at all.

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