{"id":78,"date":"2006-06-10T22:40:59","date_gmt":"2006-06-10T20:40:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/?p=78"},"modified":"2006-06-10T22:43:00","modified_gmt":"2006-06-10T20:43:00","slug":"transitions-between-animation-sequences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/?p=78","title":{"rendered":"Transitions between animation sequences"},"content":{"rendered":"

All objects (including characters) in the game world advertise their opportunities. Mostly based on its relationship with these objects, a Drama Princess character chooses one of these opportunities as its goal.
\nAn opportunity consists of several animations played in sequence<\/strong>. When a character chooses one as its goal, it’s going to play these animations one after the other. Some sequences will simply play from start to finish<\/strong>, after which a new goal can be chosen. Others may pause by putting the character in a certain state<\/strong>, typically expressed by a looping animation. After a while the character will get bored with this opportunity and it will finish the sequence by playing the final animation.<\/p>\n

When a sequence has finished and before the character chooses a new goal, the character is in an idle state<\/strong>. To have the character return to the same kind of idle behaviour, like a neutral stance<\/strong> (as happens in The Sims and The Endless Forest) , looks very unnatural. To solve this issue our environment <\/strong>objects will offer several idle behaviours<\/strong> that are available for the current environment. So rather than going to a neutral stance when an animation sequence ends, the character will select an idle behaviour from the ones offered by the environment.<\/p>\n

When a character is moving towards a relatively uninteresting goal and meets another character with which it has a good relationship, there’s a very good chance that it will interrupt <\/strong>what it was doing in favour of interacting with the other character. So rather than finishing the sequence and selecting an idle behaviour from the environment object, it will immediately start playing the animation sequence of the opportunity offered by the other character that it chose as its new goal.
\nFor both cases, idle behaviour and interruption, a transition <\/strong>between two animation sequences will be required. Since so many combinations are possible (especially in the case of interruption), we cannot hard-code all transition animations.<\/p>\n

Blending <\/strong>between two random poses almost always looks unnatural and can in some cases produce unwanted effects (like character rotating through the floor).<\/p>\n

But we could simplify the problem by stylizing of our concept of invitation<\/strong>. When a character chooses to do an interaction with another character, it will send an invitation to this character and wait for it to respond and move to the right location and into the right starting pose. Then the interaction can happen, nice and synchronized. This moment of invitation could be made explicit in a certain pose that is always the same. Then the complexity of transitioning is at least reduced by half: we know the end of the transition.<\/p>\n

The problem is that this may end up looking like a neutral stance in between animation sequences, mentioned above as decidedly unnatural. This is hardly acceptable. But it may be an area where we need to compromise. Perhaps extreme stylization (maybe in combination with camera cuts) may help make this more acceptable.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All objects (including characters) in the game world advertise their opportunities. Mostly based on its relationship with these objects, a Drama Princess character chooses one of these opportunities as its goal. An opportunity consists of several animations played in sequence. When a character chooses one as its goal, it’s going to play these animations one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}