Overview

This document describes how to loop your Creature authored procedural animation. If you are using Physics based Bone Motors ( like the Bend Physics Motor ), you might have noticed that making a perfectly looping animation might not be easy via tweaking of parameters or setting of frame ranges blindly. Hence, Creature provides 3 powerful solutions available to you for looping these kinds of animations.

Video Tutorial

Please watch this comprehensive Video Tutorial on how to easily create seamless looping animations in Creature here.

Easy Option: Auto Loop Inference for Game Engine Export

Go into Animation Mode and click on Make Animation Loop (Toolbar) -> Auto Loop Inference for Game Engine Export to run this option.

This is by far the simplest and most straightforward way if you just want to get a looping animation when exported out into a Game Engine. Creature will try its best to determine the best possible looping frame range from your current animation. It will then return you what it thinks the best possible frame range it. If you accept the frame range, Creature will then proceed to set the frame range in Game Engine Export. Take note, you current animation's frame range still remains exactly the same. However, if you go into Export -> Game Engines -> Frame Ranges, you will see that the new looping frame range has been set for your animation clip.

To verify that the animation is looping correctly, for Creature Pro owners, you can run an Advanced Game Engine Export to preview the exported result.

Easy Option: Loop and Convert to FK (Bone Motors Only)

Another easy way to make your bone motor animation loop is via the Loop and Convert to FK tool. This will automatically loop the animation for you by blending the ending frames of your animation with the starting frames of your animation. The final results involve converting the entire animation into FK Motors and writing the results back into keyframes. The frame range of your animation will also be reduced as part of the looping mechanism.

You can watch the video tutorial here.

First, go into Animation Mode and click on Make Animation Loop (Toolbar) -> Loop and Convert to FK:

Non

This will bring up a window with options:

Non

  • Blend Frames: Number of frames to begin blending into the starting frames of the animation to allow for a looping result. This value will trim the frame range of your final animation. The higher the value, the shorter your final animation will become.

  • Conversion Detail: How detailed the animation keyframes/splines of the converted FK Motor looped animation will be. Reducing the detail results in knot/spline reduction or simplification.

Advanced Option: Animation Loop Analysis

Animation Loop Analysis is a tool that allows you to analyse your animation and determine the best looping frame range. It accomplishes this by letting the user find frame ranges with the smallest differences between start and end.

Please watch the video tutorial below to learn how to use this tool:

Non