System for seamless animation Transition
One solution to help reduce the number of canned animations that are included in an application is to use procedural animation. Procedural animation may include generating an animation in, response to a trigger within an application based on a plurality of stored animation frames, which may be created using motion capture techniques. However, in some cases, procedural animations may not look lifelike because, for example, there are insufficient stored animation frames and/or the frames selected using the procedural animation technique do not blend smoothly.
Embodiments of systems and processes disclosed herein use example-based procedural animation techniques to create smooth, lifelike animations. Systems herein can identify a character pose at the end of each game update frame. This character pose identified at the end of each game update frame may be different from the expected pose determined based on the current animation displayed as a result of the calculations performed by the physics engine. The character pose determined at the end of each game update frame may be referred to as a “final pose”. The systems described herein can extract features from the final pose that may be used to identify a specific motion capture frame to use in generating an animation. Extracting features may include identifying information associated with the features. These features may include joint rotations expressed with quaternions, coordinates of points on a skeleton or on a model mesh, or any geometric feature that may be used to capture or identify distinctive features of the pose. In some embodiments, a particular portion of the final pose may be used to identify the particular motion capture frame to use in generating the animation. For example, a polygon formed by the joints at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist of the final pose of a character may be used to identify the particular motion capture frame in a set of potential motion capture frames for use in the animation.
https://patents.justia.com/patent/10388053
Surely the whole process should be simple. In theory. The entire real game is made up of situations where players begin to do something and then it's halted because of unexpected (or faster than expected) pressure, a bad touch, a change of mind, it was a deliberate fake, etc. so why don't they have bridging animations to insert in there to maintain the flow? Where something is in the initial stages of being performed such as a quick turn, it can either follow through the rest of the animation as intended or if one of those situations above occur, a realistic exit from that animation into whatever animation is needed to bridge it between the cancelled move and the new animation of whatever comes next.
Think of it like this. An old SIMS game might have had an animation of somebody stood up and somebody sitting down, but no transition animations. You'd expect a newer version of the game to have the bridging animations so you can watch the player sit down or stand up, not just the end results. If the player went to stand up and turned left while he was in the standing up animation because he was going to walk to the left instead of just face ahead and stand there, that animation should exist and if halfway in standing up and turning, you change your mind and go to the right, that transition/bridging animation should be in the system so it flows rather than it being like skipping frames in a movie.
PES2021 is a good example of less animations but a much smoother flow in transition between cancelled/interupted animations. When FIFA announced they had like 20,000 animations for this hyper-motion (bullshit) thing, I expected the gameplay to be smoother than a dolphins arse. But instead they had no plan to implement what happens NATURALLY in every footy game ever played, a change of mind/circumstance where body movement supports that transition into the new action. How would you be Konami and not think you'd need transitionary anomations rather than in the blink of an eye a player has Matrixed from being halfway through a stepover to suddenly sprinting off into another direction. Past football games managed this transition with less animations available but it seems that EA forgot A, B and C don't just exist by themselves. There has to be a transition from A to C, or C to B, or whatever.
Perhaps hyper-motion is taking the game too far because a quicker smoother animation in recent games (such as PES2021 gameplay) can be pulled off with user input in a timely fashion but FIFA is like watching a train stop and change directions at times and others it's going from one animation to another with no bridge at all.
Bottom line, what started promising on the NG is now truly effed up. I had to stop playing after the last patch because no matter what you put the spring/acceleration sliders to, the animations are set at a fixed speed so they don't fit in with whatever adjustments you make.
Maybe we'll just be stuck playing FIFA16 and PES21 for the rest of our lives given the way the market is going. Just because FIFA23 will be the last one to carry the name doesn't mean it won't come out of the box a complete mess and a foreshadowing of the EA FC pay-to-win bollocks.
