DIGIPENDENCE - declare yours!

In previous Moviestorm incarnations, you may have noticed that every once in awhile certain annoying things would happen, things like feet going through floors, hands going doors, etc. This was because of somthing called ‘blended animation’. It doesn’t just happen in this movie-making tool, sometimes it’s noticable in video games too. Programmers try to anticipate what people are going to do, but they can never be exactly sure, and sometimes things don’t work out as perfectly as they - or their users - would like. Here’s how it’s explained on the their development blog:

The problem is caused by layering animations one on top of each other, and linking them together. If we knew exactly what you were going to do, we could ensure that everything just worked fine. However, because this is a movie tool, the range of possibilities is, quite literally, infinite. We can find ourselves blending together the animations for walking (mixing two gaits and the speed customised), using a prop (with each individual activity customised), gesturing (customised), facial expression and improvisation (yes, also customised), talking (you get the idea now?), looking at something (possibly a moving object), breathing, and blinking. Each of those is a separate mathematical transform that has to be applied to the skeleton, and then checked to make sure it’s anatomically possible. Blending them all together involves taking all the different transformations and working out how they all go together. So one activity may tell the character to put her hand behind her head (improvised scratch), another tells her to lift it straight up (dance gesture), and a third tells her to swing it by her side (walk) - you try doing all three at once and see how far you get. It’s no wonder our Moviestorm characters get confused.

The good news is that some guy called ‘Mark’ at Moviestorm has really done a nice job recently of overcoming blended animation issues. There’s a detailed explanation on their development blog, along with two videos, call them ‘before Mark’, and ‘after Mark’. The first video shows a character with some issues, like his feet going through the floor when he sits down. The second video shows the same clip only the character’s feet do not go through the floor. It’s all about the math. And it doesn’t matter if you hated math in high school, you don’t really need to know the math in order to appreciate what Mark has done. Sort of like one doesn’t have to know everything about a car to have fun driving it. This is early states yet, and won’t be available until at least v1.1.7 and that’s some time away.

Special note: The before and after videos on the development blog are a little small, so I’ve grabbed them so that you can get a much better view:

Before Mark:

After Mark: