Got a couple of questions.

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ffgg
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Feb 06, 2019 10:26 am

Got a couple of questions.

Post by ffgg » Wed Feb 06, 2019 10:47 am

Sorry for a lot of question but I already try reading docs and Youtube tutorials. but still can't fully understand it.

1. :?: In my situation, I'm making a slime with animation and it has 2 faces smile and angry so I decided to use Skin Swapping features with 2 skins, smile and angry. and currently have 2 animation Idle and Hurt. In idle everything work fine when smile skin is active it smiles and vice versa.

but in Hurt animation I want it to have a hurt face no matter what current skin is active. How should I do this?

Do I have to use Image swap to swap hurt face and replace both skin faces (smile and angry) on region mesh and animate them 2 times for each skin and try to make them similar to each other? Is there an option for me to copy motor settings and timeline and replace on other bone or region mesh?

Or there is a better solution?

2. :?: How to add image/sprite/effect on a certain frame or animation? for example if you animate a character that swing a sword and I would like add sword swing motion and any other effect to certain points in animation. How should I do this?

3. :?: If I start creature project with 1 single image and would like to add new image part to it without corrupting any rig/animation, how should I do this? Repack atlas image seems to make image quality and position worse every time I use it.

4. :?: In Meshing, I can't seem to move sprite to re order them?

5. :?: I try using region switching .SetActiveItemSwap(region_name, tagID); in Unity but the image being switched isn't at right size of the original region
and auto fit sprite swap of simple transform motor doesn't seem to help to make swapped image to be at the correct size of original region. (I try this by swapping Slime face from one to another and the new swapped one appear to be smaller)

6. :?: Is there a call back in unity run time for general animation state like start/complete/loopComplete? The document only mention specific event that you need to put in for each animation.

Thank you for your help!

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Got a couple of questions.

Post by chong » Wed Feb 06, 2019 6:11 pm

Hello!

0) Duplicating Bone Motor Settings ( of similar motors ): In Animate Mode, Go into Animate -> Copy Values of Selected Motor to copy. Then select the desired motor for duplication and run Animate -> Paste Values of Selected Motor into it. Currently this is for Bone Motors only. However, I will look into allowing the feature to work for Mesh and other motors as well in upcoming updates. Reason is because not all Mesh Motors can be duplicated ( some depend on meshes having the same topology and number of points so those cannot be duplicated. However, a smarter way of determining if the mesh motor can be duplicated will be looked into so that mesh motors that are compatible for duplication will work. )

1) In your rig you can add a new face region mesh that has the hurt expression. It will cover the original face. Go back into Animate mode. Select the Hurt region mesh. You should see Red, Green, Blue, Alpha populated in the animation timeline. These are all keyable. You can basically set all of them to 0 so the hurt region mesh becomes invisible. The you can make it appear whenever you want by setting those values ( keyframing ) to 100. This allows you to toggle on/off the visibility of the selected region mesh.

2) Not quite sure what you mean by this. But you can use the similar trick in 1), by keyframing the R,G,B,A values of region meshes to make them appear/not appear over time. Or a fancier way is to use the Flow FX system for more advanced particle effects ( but the runtimes for Unity are not available yet. Next release will have UE4 support )

3) The next upcoming update will address this. It will have a grow/shrink atlas feature that allows you to enlarge/shrink the texture atlas without affecting any rigging regions. So you will run this function, then there is the Add/Insert New Image Part feature which allows you to drop in a new image part to the texture atlas. Repacking should also be improved for the next version in terms of image quality.

Another way to do it is typically to author from source in PSD and then re-import the PSD. It will generate a new texture atlas for you with your updated PSD image layers.

In any case, the new update will be released soon.

4) Ordering is not determined in meshing mode. The ordering is determined in rigging mode. Go into Rig Mode and from there, you can move up/down the order layers of your region mesh.

5) I think instead for your case, you might want to consider using the opacity/alpha switching technique. You have to make sure the mesh you generated can fit both images. If not, switch out the regions by setting their alphas.

6) I am not sure if there is one officially yet, but there are many ways to achieve this. One way is to link it up with MecAnim since it is MecAnim compliant. Then you can listen for events from there. The other way is to add events at the end of each animation in the editor. I can look into adding this as well so you can get these events more easily. But in general it is quite easy to figure out just from the current runtime. You can get the currently active animation times via GetActiveAnimationStartTime() and GetActiveAnimationEndTime(). Then you can get the current runtime/frame via getActualRuntime(). This should be all the info you need to determine where you are in the active animation clip.'

Thanks

ffgg
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Feb 06, 2019 10:26 am

Re: Got a couple of questions.

Post by ffgg » Fri Feb 08, 2019 10:52 am

Hello, Thank you for your response.

What I mean in question 2 is how to insert/remove image where ever you want in animation.
like If I animate a character swing a sword and I would like to insert sword trail sprite on a certain frame, and also edit it's color, position, rotation and etc. How should I do this in Creature?

Do I need a place holder region just for every effect/sprite that I want to appear in animation? and what about animation that I don't need it? like I have a placeholder for sword trail effect for swinging a sword animation but in Idle animation which I don't need the placeholder. I just set it alpha to 0 for it's not appear? Is this how it designed to work or I miss some features?

also another question :?: I know that you can use Tag in Sprite Manager windows to do Image Swapping on region you want on runtime but how Do you do Image Swapping from Character Meshes, in Image Swapping from Character Meshes, it doesn't show Tag


Thank you.

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Got a couple of questions.

Post by chong » Fri Feb 08, 2019 5:31 pm

Hello,

1) For color go into Animate Mode -> Region Tab. Select the region mesh. In the Knots/Spline Timeline Panel (lower half of the main Animation Window ), Red, Green, Blue, Alpha tracks will show up. You can keyframe these values from 0 to 100. Good news as well is the next update will make it even easier to keyframe the ( they will also show up in the inspector )

For translation, rotation you have a lot of choices. Easiest choice is to have a single bone that is weighted to that mesh region. Then you just animate that bone to transform the region. Another way is to install the Simple Transform Mesh Motor on it. You can set the mode to Fast since you just need simple transforms. Using that mesh motor, you can set scaling, translation, rotations etc. with a relative origin that you can also set.

2) Yes you can keyframe alpha values to accomplish what you want.


3) Tagging only works currently for the Sprite Frame Manager since that was what it was designed for.

Thanks

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