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[Annabelle Kennedy]

Annabelle:  o_o WOW! Seriously? This thread just keeps getting more uncanny. : D

Not only do I pass CalArts daily, it's like a foot away from my house.. so I'm always around there! I have a bunch of connections to CalArts, too. Not to mention every day I'm driving into work down McBean Parkway, I pass it. Were you in the character animation program by any chance? Do you know the instructor Mike Disa? Uh... are you still close to CalArts?? (:

Sorry for the stack of ?'s .. We gotta talk! :3   (Jeeze, the world IS small!)

hahaha im not in cali anymore though... i used to be , though thats why i mentioned it

[Eclipse]

hahaha im not in cali anymore though... i used to be , though thats why i mentioned it

is it a graphics school or what? sounds interesting D:

oh well i'm so out of the world i can only see and cry... 

[BenH]

Yeah, California Institute of the Arts

[JamesPopStar]

You guys really should just create a game even manlier than that somehow, just to push the testosterone limit even further.

Sorry, skipped this one Don't feel bad about Contra 4, I think many didn't even beat easy mode. I'm not sure you can get manlier than Contra 4 anyhow; the game card would combust or something. And.. yeah, looks like konjak came to answer. (hi Joakim! We enjoy Noitu Love 2 : D) This should become the official thread of what a small world we all live in, but it's really supposed to be about animating giant bosses.. and I'm completely off topic. x)

hahaha im not in cali anymore though... i used to be , though thats why i mentioned it

Aww, bummerrr... Was hoping you were close by, Annabelle. Oh well. I'm still impressed by the degrees of connection in this thread. WayForward is always looking for nearby talented 2D artists that have any sort of passion for games, and desire to work on Nintendo Wii and DS projects. Also any exp with pixel art, general game knowledge etc.

[Eclipse]

this thread is going to make me more sad at every post

[BenH]

Hey Kirby, speaking of Wayforward, does a guy named Nick Kraich still work there? He'd be on the programming team if he is

[BenH]

Okay, so I've been trying to make my own 2d skeletal animation system to animate this giant boss stuff. Everything pretty much works except one thing; rotations.

I need the system to figure out what the shortest angle would be for that bone to reach it's target angle. So basically, since the angles are 0-360, if I rotate a bone slightly so that it goes from 0º in one frame to 350º in the next frame, currently the system will interpolate that and the bone will rotate the long way round. I've tried various ways of getting it to rotate in the opposite direction if it's the shorter route, but it seems to keep messing up.

If anyone has a simple solution (I'm sure I'm over complicating things as usual), then I'd love to hear it.

Cheers!

[DangerMomentum]

Alright, these scripts are for GM, but it should be pretty easy to translate this to anything. Here's my SmoothAngle script. The first argument is the current angle, second argument is the target angle, and the third is a fraction to smooth by (try something like 0.3). It returns the new value. This code accounts for the problem you're mentioning there, so hopefully it helps!

SmoothAngle:

Code:

var currentAngle, deltaAngle, ratio;
currentAngle = argument0;
targetAngle = argument1;
ratio = argument2;

if(abs(currentAngle-targetAngle) >= 180)
{
    if(currentAngle > 180)
        return Clamp360(currentAngle + ( 359 - ( currentAngle - targetAngle ) ) * ratio);
    return Clamp360(currentAngle - ( 359 - ( targetAngle - currentAngle ) ) * ratio );

}
else
    return Clamp360(currentAngle + (targetAngle - currentAngle) * ratio);

Clamp360:

Code:

return frac(argument0/360)*360;

[BenH]

That was just what I was looking for! It works perfectly

Funnily enough I'm using Game Maker, so I was able to just copy and paste it straight in and replace my angle tween code with it!

Thanks so much, it's very much appreciated!

[Problem Machine]

It seems to me like the really hard part would be making the animations, rather than making the code to animate things. Actually, for a game I'm planning, I'd need to have a system like this for the protagonist, and figuring it out has been a REAL sticking point.
edit: Although, now that I think about it, I may have been making it more difficult than it needs to be

[Chris Whitman]

My recommendation would be just making it interpolate between poses, and writing a tool to edit pose information visually.

[BorisTheBrave]

Interpolating between poses can be dangerous, if you mean store every part in absolute co-ordinates, as you cannot guarantee that joints will be preserved over the course of the animation (i.e. that my forearm and upper arm both have ends that meet where my elbow should be).

P.S. AMT, your angle code is ugly. Here's a nicer one, though still messy as I'm assuming a the stupid behaviour for modulo to return an answer with the same sign as the first argument.

Code:

delta = endAngle - startAngle + 180;
delta  = delta % 360 + delta>0?-180:180;
finalAngle = delta * ratio + startAngle;

Or the following, if your language doesn't support ternary operators.

Code:

delta = endAngle - startAngle + 180;
if(delta>0){
  delta = delta % 360 - 180;
}else{
  delta = delta % 360 + 180;
}
finalAngle = delta * ratio + startAngle;

[DangerMomentum]

If you use a bone system instead of just storing coordinates for each part you should be able to make it work fairly well. I had a skeleton animation system working pretty well in GM, I'll post it on here once I can clean up / comment the code so someone can actually learn from it. I'm not too familiar with the modulo function, so my code didn't use it.

[BenH]

If you use a bone system instead of just storing coordinates for each part you should be able to make it work fairly well. I had a skeleton animation system working pretty well in GM, I'll post it on here once I can clean up / comment the code so someone can actually learn from it. I'm not too familiar with the modulo function, so my code didn't use it.

That'd be great
My skeleton stuff works, but it's hardly usable or friendly for games, so taking a look at someone else's technique/ideas would definitely be useful.