Using strafing animation...

[Ragnar Brynjúlfsson]

Is there a way to have a character always facing in the same direction, while still navigating?

I have a few animations, life walk forward, strafe left and strafe right, where the characters walks sideways while still facing forward. When I prep the anim for Golaem it seems to be working correctly, but when I bring it into a crowd scene, they all show up as being straight forward in the little motion pyramid thing. Overriding rotation to 45 degrees on the strafing MotionClips does get me the pyramid back and it uses the strafe animation for a moment while turning, but it still changes the facing of the character, so once it has finished turning, it keeps walking forward in a new direction.

Anyone have any suggesionts for handling strafing animations in Golaem?

[Yann Pinczon du Sel]

Hi there,

What you see in the 'little motion pyramid thing' are the linear and angular velocities (https://golaem.com/content/doc/golaem-crowd-documentation/creating-locomotion-set), not the actual motion direction.

The strafe animation you provide surely has some non-null linear velocity (the speed at which it strafes), but a null angular velocity (it always keeps in the same direction), so that's why it shows as a forward motion.

If you want to use a strafe animation in a locomotion, you should not mix them with regular motion, and you should provide a full set of strafe animations:

• a strafe animation that goes linear
• a strafe animation that actually turns to the left (changes the orientation of the body while strafing)
• a strafe animation that actually turns right.

Let us know if that makes sense to you.

Best,

Yann

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[Nicolas Chaverou]

Hey Ragnar,

Just want to add some details on top of Yann previous answer

Should we assume you're trying to have entities avoiding each other and / or reaching a target and on top of that you'd like them to strafe ?

Strafe should happen instead of turning or there are some situations where you'd like them to turn and you'd like them to strafe ?

If you can provide more details about the use case, it'd be great :)

Best

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[Ragnar Brynjúlfsson]

Thanks for the quick response. For now, I'm just going to skip strafing and have them turn as normal instead, so I don't really need a solution for this.

But for completeness, the original idea was to have them all be charging forward in generally the same directions, but have some of them strafe around obstacles or chase a moving target in the distance (to fake intentionally going from side to side to avoid getting hit by enemy bullets). I guess it's a bit of a weird corner case. 

Originally I was thinking that if you had animations of a character walking in all directions while always facing the same way (forwards, backwards, strafe sideways, and strafe at 30 and 60 degrees in all directions), you could have him use those to navigate while always facing the same way. E.g. if he's facing north, and walks south, it would trigger the walk backwards anim, if he walks north-west, it would trigger the strafe forward left anim and so on.

If you want to play with this on your end, just grab the "Pro Rifle Pack" of Mixamo, it should have all the different strafing anims you need.

Thanks.

[Nicolas Chaverou]

Hey there

See inlined below

On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 7:28 AM Ragnar Brynjúlfsson <rag...@stormstudios.no> wrote:

Thanks for the quick response. For now, I'm just going to skip strafing and have them turn as normal instead, so I don't really need a solution for this.

But for completeness, the original idea was to have them all be charging forward in generally the same directions, but have some of them strafe around obstacles or chase a moving target in the distance (to fake intentionally going from side to side to avoid getting hit by enemy bullets). I guess it's a bit of a weird corner case. 

Originally I was thinking that if you had animations of a character walking in all directions while always facing the same way (forwards, backwards, strafe sideways, and strafe at 30 and 60 degrees in all directions), you could have him use those to navigate while always facing the same way. E.g. if he's facing north, and walks south, it would trigger the walk backwards anim, if he walks north-west, it would trigger the strafe forward left anim and so on.

Gotcha, thanks for sharing the use case, that's interesting indeed

A workaround would be to trigger those animations outside of a Locomotion behavior when you get closer to your obstacles / or under a predefined condition

If you need to resume this back in your shot, let us know and I can try to build a quick setup showing the main ideas

 

If you want to play with this on your end, just grab the "Pro Rifle Pack" of Mixamo, it should have all the different strafing anims you need.

Duly noted :)