Reikster
Jan 1 2005, 07:14 PM
I'm trying to get my head 100% around doing walk cycles or other cycles and this is kind of a philosophical question, perhaps.
Say you have a walk cycle that has full stride, right foot forward at "0:00" and left foot forward at "0:12" and again right foot forward at "0:24".
AM calls this a 24 frame cycle, even though it would be actually 25 frames if you let the last one play out fully. For this reason to get it to play back correctly in the action, you have to set the play range for 0-23.
Hmmm...I guess I'm kinda rambling. I did kinda have two questions.
1) Let's talk frame numbers for a second. The "full length" of my action is 0.0000 through 24.9999, but I think when it gets cycl-ized, it plays 0.0000 through 23.9999 so that you get the start and end frames to exactly match up. Is this right? The only reason I get all sub-decimal frame number-ish is for the circumstances when you either change the path ease or animate the action ease and the action frame numbers don't translate 1:1 into chor frame numbers.
2) Second question is what I guess I really meant to ask, other stuff was just me talking myself through understanding this. Can you think of a reason you would trim a cyclic action with the chor range values? The only time I can think of it is for starting and ending.
hmmm....I'm still not sure if I had a real question, just more like practicing for Jeopardy answering myself in the form of a question.
anyways, feel free to add any comments to my rambling....sorry to have distracted you.
eric
ZachBG
Jan 2 2005, 06:22 AM
Hi, Eric:
AFAIK, you don't need to worry about Crop Ranges on stride-length enabled actions. A:M takes care of that automatically. Repeating actions are another story. (And note well, we're talking, I think, about the Crop Range property; Chor Range just determines how fast the action plays in the choreography; Crop Range actually determines how much of an action is used.)
I'll have to do some experimentation to determine if I'm right (later... sorry, I need my breakky-fast) but I think that with a non-stride-length, repeating action, you do want to set the crop range to one less than the entire range of frames. I do know that, when animating, you want to set up your actual play range in the Action window that way, so you can get an accurate view of the repeat when playing the Action.
Animus
Jan 2 2005, 07:06 AM
I want to add another question to Eric question. The resolute walk on the cd and the run action are 24.8 frames long. Both were made by William Eggington and in my opinion are superb to learn a good cycle action. It is still not clear to me why he did it that way, i wonder if it was a matter of timing or a matter of cycling?
Making a good non robotic walk cycle is so hard.
Reikster
Jan 2 2005, 02:43 PM
| QUOTE (ZachBG @ Jan 2 2005, 06:22 AM) |
AFAIK, you don't need to worry about Crop Ranges on stride-length enabled actions. A:M takes care of that automatically. Repeating actions are another story. (And note well, we're talking, I think, about the Crop Range property; Chor Range just determines how fast the action plays in the choreography; Crop Range actually determines how much of an action is used.)
|
Zach,
I guess I should have mentioned an example of what I thought you could do with Crop Range...it's kinda out there and well, I was kind of out of it last night as evidenced by the near lack of coherency of my original post.
Imagine you made a Walk cycle, but you wanted to add some variation so you actually made 3 walk cycles, back to back all with slightly different nuances or weighting.
Let's say for example they're all 24 frames long so the total is...umm..72.
When you use this action, I 'think' you could set the crop range to 0:72 or to 24:48 or to 48:72 or 24:72 and you'd have different combos of your slightly different cycles that you end up mixing and matching.
Now why this has any advantage over making three independent actions, I haven't a clue, but it's the only usage I could come up with for crop range on a cyclic action besides generating a half stride for start/stop(which may work better with an ease).
I did have one more thought about actions that perhaps is indicative of me thinking too much, and after this I'll stop and go back to drawing stick figures (the extent of my drawing talent) or attempts at animation.
I'm wondering if anyone makes their reusable actions in "slow motion" or maybe another phrase would be "over-keying".
Explanation: Since you can modulate the ease to get a slow down or speed up of an action and since the action ease is kind of controlled for you on cyclic actions based on your path ease/stride length/frames per stride it occurs to me that one might want to take a walk with a normal 12 frame stride @24FPS and make the reusable action at something bigger, say something huge like 96 frames. This way when you put it into the choreography, with maybe 3 strides over 1.5 seconds (36 frames) and you are off a little or you want to change timing a little then you KNOW that all of the frames will still look good.
I guess another way to do this without "over-keying" would be to stick your 24 frame walk cycle into a choreography with a path that makes it do 2 strides over a large number of frames, say 144, and then you can see if all of the interpolated inbetween frames from your action come out looking smooth enough for you.
Maybe "over-keying" would be good if you routinely switch between 24FPS and 30FPS. You could choose something that ends up being the LCM of your action at both FPS.
eric
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