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
- Look-at
Animation Controllers(Chapter 11.12)
- A higher level above the Animation State Machine
- Animation Controller: control the overall animation details
- Different by needs