Animation Part 4 Action State Machine

11.11 Action State Machine

• ASM servers as a middle layer between the game character control and low level pipeline
• state-layering: multiple layers of ASM to control different aspects of character movements, such as full-body locomotion, facial expressions and upper-body gestures

11.11.1 Animation States

• states: blend tree nodes

11.11.2 Transitions

11.11.3 State Layers

11.11.4 Control Parameters

Searching parameters for blend options might be hard

• ways
  • Node search (give a name for each specific node)
  • Named variables(assign names to the individual control parameters
  • Control structure(data structure of record these parameters)

11.11.5 Constrains

Constrains are set to a character when performing actions

• Attachments
  • Joint A of Object A is attached to Joint B of Object B
  • Usually parent-child
  • Add additional joint?
    • add cost of animation processing, not viable
    • New kind of ‘joint’: attach points
      • attach points can be used for attachments
      • but do not affect the final pose of the skeleton
• Interobject registration
  • line up separate clips in a scene
  • Reference Locators
    • Store location of the locator
    • Store its relative positions to the local object space of each actor
    • Transform the origins of each actor according to the relative positions when they are put in the scene
      
      
    • find the world-space reference location
      • who decides where the reference locator in world-space should be ?
      • one way in the two-men-one-door example
        • door is still, use door as reference
      • Or manually assign the world-space coordinates of the locator
  • Grabing and hand IK
    • bring the end effector to the right position by adjusting a short chain of joints
    • After local and global poses have been calculated, before the final matrix palette calculation
  • Motion extraction and Foot IK
    • solve foot sliding problem
    • Motion extraction
      • Extracted root motion: motion after zeroing the forward motion, keeping the local-space origin roughly under the center of mass of the character(moon-walking)
      • Apply extracted motion data(such as move speed) to the local-space origin; data such as speed can be used to set the playback rate align the clip with the speed
        
    • Foot IK
      • foot moving on uneven terrain
      • use the foot joint as end effector, tuning a chain of joints above when foot stays on the ground
      • feel v.s. look trade-off
• Other kinds of constrains
  • Look-at
    • twist eyes, or eyes and head, or eyes. head and a twist of the entire upper body
    • Implemented via IK, procedural joint offsets, or additive blending
  • Cover registration
    • allow a character to align perfectly with the cover
    • Implemented via the reference locator
  • Cover entrance and departure
  • Traversal aids
    • character travel through objects such as grass
    • implemented via reference locator

Animation Controllers(Chapter 11.12)

• A higher level above the Animation State Machine
• Animation Controller: control the overall animation details
• Different by needs