17 replies to this topic

[DeathWaffle]

Please don't make the Marauder take baby steps like the Phract or the Pult, make the walking and running animation be long steps like it's meant to, I'm counting on you PG *wink wink* *nod nod*

[Kiiyor]

DeathWaffle, on 12 October 2015 - 01:20 AM, said:

Please don't make the Marauder take baby steps like the Phract or the Pult, make the walking and running animation be long steps like it's meant to, I'm counting on you PG *wink wink* *nod nod*

I remember the old days, when the walk cycle was desynched with engines and whatnot.

My Awesome strode the battlefield like a ponderous, implacable wall of steel.

Then, an attempt to appease the dark lords of realism queued permanent Benny Hill music.

[MeiSooHaityu]

Really? I always thought the Catapult had a good walking animation and stride. I never thought of it having baby steps.

I don't know if really long strides are necessary seeing as it isn't flying around at 150kph. I guess just make sure the Marauder walks appropriately for it's shape and size.

[Paigan]

DeathWaffle, on 12 October 2015 - 01:20 AM, said:

Please don't make the Marauder take baby steps like the Phract or the Pult, make the walking and running animation be long steps like it's meant to, I'm counting on you PG *wink wink* *nod nod*

I guess that's a purely mathematical / geometrical thing, isn't it?
If it has a top speed of 50-70 kph (depending on engine) and it would make the wide steps its chassis implies, it would have to move in slow motion in order to not go to fast.

Keep in mind: artists don't care about / check / understand such things. They just draw what looks cool.
If the resulting chassis would mean that it would have to run 300kph with "normal" leg movement or could only run 30 kph, they don't care. They don't understand.

Edited by Paigan, 12 October 2015 - 01:54 AM.

[MW Waldorf Statler]

the Mechs in MWO very bigger,as in the Universe (16-17m in MWO= 10-12m in the Universe (Shadowhawk ~9,6m in BT Universe) make the Mechs smaller, the must faster run,for the same Range in Time.
Is a very Great Problem, to making good looking Running Animations for massive walking Mechs...the most games make the Mechs bigger ,and slower (MW 4)

Edited by CSJ Ranger, 12 October 2015 - 02:29 AM.

[MeiSooHaityu]

CSJ Ranger, on 12 October 2015 - 02:27 AM, said:

...the most games make the Mechs bigger ,and slower (MW 4)

That game had odd walking animations IMO (although some have praised it). When I look at MW4, it looks like all the mechs are shuffling their feet lol.

This game gets it wrong from time to time, but overall I think it looks pretty good in most cases.

[627]

One of the best walking animations is on the cicada. Even at high speeds it runs around with grace. I hope it will be more cicada and less dire wolf or even the crab. That looks so ridiculous with a high engine...

[SgtMagor]

the Hopper seems to be Bunny hopping at 86kph

[MeiSooHaityu]

SgtMagor, on 12 October 2015 - 03:16 AM, said:

the Hopper seems to be Bunny hopping at 86kph

Uhh...duh, it's a GrassHOPPER!

[SgtMagor]

MeiSooHaityu, on 12 October 2015 - 03:23 AM, said:

Uhh...duh, it's a GrassHOPPER!

ciaosuu

[zagibu]

SgtMagor, on 12 October 2015 - 03:16 AM, said:

the Hopper seems to be Bunny hopping at 86kph

No, it looks like a man trying to run in high heels.

[Alistair Winter]

It's all about the length of the legs. The Awesome runs around like the hippo ballerinas from Fantasia because its stubby legs are really short, so when you put an XL380 in your AWS-9M, it sounds like an avalanche of rocks when you move.

The Mauler has a similar problem, I think. And it has a lot of vertical movement, bobbing up and down way too fast for a natural walk cycle. It seems unnatural to see 90 tons move up and down so fast. Seems like inertia would prevent it from dropping down so rapidly. But then again, MWO is operating with 3 times normal gravity.

The Marauder has really long legs, so I expect it will look good, like the Cicada. That is to say, it probably won't take baby steps. But will it bounce up and down like a baby ostrich learning how to walk for the first time? Possibly.

[Illya Ghost Bear]

Paigan, on 12 October 2015 - 01:53 AM, said:

Keep in mind: artists don't care about / check / understand such things. They just draw what looks cool.
If the resulting chassis would mean that it would have to run 300kph with "normal" leg movement or could only run 30 kph, they don't care. They don't understand.

Or they do care, but rule of cool wins out, because most "real" robots and exosuits, etc look like boring medical equipment.

[Paigan]

Illya Arkhipova, on 12 October 2015 - 04:30 AM, said:

Or they do care, but rule of cool wins out, because most "real" robots and exosuits, etc look like boring medical equipment.

Yeah, okay, or that way

[mark v92]

It feel like the walking animations needs to be less 'stiff'

If i look at MWLL you had the walking animations for lower speeds and when you increased the throttle your mech started to run more/take bigger steps. that looked and felt great

[Mad Porthos]

Illya Arkhipova, on 12 October 2015 - 04:30 AM, said:

Or they do care, but rule of cool wins out, because most "real" robots and exosuits, etc look like boring medical equipment.

In the case of a game like MWO, specifically the rule of cool always wins - I am not just being facetious. Cool wins over gravity even. There are some very basic things that we see in the game and take for granted because we expect to see them, but that do not follow real life physics. Some of these are things like hair pin turns on mechs - despite the leg that would have to be doing the stepping to make the turn, being in mid air off the edge of a ledge. In other cases, there is the dynamic where a mech can balance on another mech, gaining the speed of the bottom mech in order to deploy somewhere they never should be able to reach. I see this fairly often in experienced teams, who when called on it just say they are horsing around, by putting their jumping direwolves on top of their 150kph ravens.

The situation where rule of cool most hit me though, is how it works against jump jets and pop tarters. You can see why they did so, since the game developers hated the pop tart meta, but in essence with regards to jumping, everything is at 3 times normal earth gravity, so when it says a planet's gravity is 1.0 or .98... it's really not. This is because if you use real physics engines for an object the size and weight of a mech, it will boost up to the top of it's jump and as gravity finally counters it's upwards momentuum, it will seem to hang in the air an extra bit of time as gravity begins to accelerate it's fall downwards. Acceleration starts out small and builds, with it not being FASTER just because an object is heavier - so jumping mechs seem to hang in the air longer that seems "natural" to people who are used to seeing each other run and jump around the environment and expect mechs to somehow behave the same, with only a little ponderousness.

With a 1.0G acceleration from gravity, that means 9.8 meters per second falling which compounds with each second (that's the meters/sec squared part). When you have a 15m tall mech, it seems odd for it to take a whole second to fall only a part of it's height in that first second, even if very quickly it accelerates like normal after that- after all if a human jumps up on a trampoline, it doesnt take them a whole second to fall half of their height. To those who saw this happening, they thought it looked unrealistic having massive mechs sluggishly hanging in mid air for a moment and even worse, it gave too much of an advantage to a pop tarter having that stable moment when the upward acceleration of jump jets is finally cancelled by gravity's constant downward pull. So now, you reach the top of your jump and you are yanked out of the sky by effectively reverse jump jets... or more, a 3x normal gravity, so that too people's perceptions a mech is behaving more like we see short humans fall, relatively close to earth - with only our muscles powering us. Real jump jets or thusters put mechs proportionately much further into the air and make real physics and gravity more apparent, revealing that what seems visually normal or cool for human scale bodies, would not be for jumping mechs.

As to the original topic, this kind of effects it too. When a mech is walking, it is basically "falling forward". If gravity yanks it down everytime it goes off a little ledge rather than letting it's stride be actually smooth the way it is in nature, but instead we get this herky jerky walking animation. Also, there are the reverse kinematics, where they animate the feet of the mechs actually touching the angle and adjusting for the ground below, which can make all these walks look much more realistic and cool. Many of the mechs we say have good strides, have some level of kinematics modelling so their chicken leg feet do not woodenly flap around... that naturally will have to be done on the Marauder too, but it's missing on many humanoid mech and it not shown up as much as it could be, as evidenced by the MadCat/Timberwolf and it's floaty prance across the battlefield.

Edited by Mad Porthos, 12 October 2015 - 06:01 AM.

[Vellron2005]

In my opinion, just copy the walking animation of the timberwolf.. that baby struts the field like a boss..

[Juodas Varnas]

Vellron2005, on 12 October 2015 - 05:44 AM, said:

In my opinion, just copy the walking animation of the timberwolf.. that baby struts the field like a boss..

Oh god no.
It's so floaty.

Take the animations off the Catapult.
She has the best reverse-knee leg animations of all mechs.