Re: PES2010 News & Rumours thread
Exactly. The game needs a next-gen animations engine like IK (inverse Kinematics) that can generate any movement based on the body joints' range of movement, the position the feet, the ball, and the center of gravity, in correlation with the desired movement.
It also allows split second animations to be generated and integrated into any player's new position.... which is very important when generate goalkeeper movements. I can't take another year of marketing motion capture stunts and a couple of new animations slapped onto this ANCIENT engine:
I am a 3D Animator. It would be pretty amazing if each foot is using IK in terms of each animation of running, tricks etc.
Character Animation is all Heirachy Based, at some point they need a "Global bone"/"Global node" that controls the global position of the Character - the Feet are well down the chain from that node, so that's why the feet still "slide" a bit when running. Having said that, they may use blending (via code) over the top to shunt the foot into position to a point in "World" XYZ space mapped out on the field surface, therefore giving the illusion of being clamped/solid to the ground even if the player's global node is moving.
Where I would see IK being HEAVILY used is for adjusting the position of the foot in relation to the ball (like he hinted in the video) so that the foot will connect to the ball when the player hits shoot and therefore not miss the ball completely. Could you imagine how hard it would be if they didn't? heaps more shots would not only miss their target but there would be air swings and balls going 90 degrees all the time.
In the past they would do two things:
a) affect the ball position (and trajectory, speed etc) as it reaches the player slightly - you would barely notice in the PES series, but boot up ISS2000 (or was it ISS2001) on PlayStation 2 and you'd spot it, sometimes skipping/popping within a 1/10 of a second to the correct position.
b)The other thing they would do is Rotate and/or shunt/shift the Global Node to get the character in a better position for when the ball comes in.
In the older PlayStation 2 FIFA's and Pro Evo's that used to be pretty obvious - the ball was influenced into positions and characters skated around to get in position. The ball always used to hang to a character on a thread sometimes, as their engine would quite literally keep the ball attached (via heirachy) to the character as the character moved, only to release the ball when another player won a tackle (therefore assigning the ball back to the "world"'s XYZ position, and then to the successful tackling player's XYZ position). They would usually blend the XYZ positions with code.
So that is also partly why dribbling is less effective in these newer versions - if the ball is always influenced to be 30 cm away from the character you could run flat out in a straight line and keep the ball away from most opposition with insane ball control. Nowadays as the Ball uses better physics you see characters having to use multiple touches and different foot positions while dribbling to keep the ball going in the direction they need it to go.
Collision Detection? Don't get me started on that Can of Worms....!
annoying! And then leave it to us.
