Good tutorials on sync animations?

[MaeroTheMaestro73]

I've got a pretty decent library of tutorials so far primarily from Seddon. None of his stuff touches on making animations [primarily because he's a programmer]

Poked around on YouTube and haven't seen anything specific to making synced animations for kill moves or special attacks or anything else for that matter.

Anyone got any good leads on this?

[langnao]

Have you done animation? I have not done paired animation but basically its no different from animating a single character. If u look at the 'paired animation' files, its always xxx_Lead and xxx_Victim thus attacker and victim.

 

So u can handle them separately as u did when animating single character. However, you may wanna see the whole scene in one setting so to coordinate the action between the attacker & victim. The current toolset is for single character animation so u have to modify those 3ds max file and add another character to the scene. And when u export the animation, export them separately as xxx_Lead and xxx_Victim.

[langnao]

Been messing around with paired animation for a couple of days. Some interesting findings ... When paired animation was triggered in-game, the game takes care of all the positioning, synchronization etc. Doing it yourself its a pain. If you can position the receiver properly, u can then fire up the idle animation. The biggest issue is positioning ... Moving any NPCs on or near your character and they will be repelled as if 'bring two magnets of same pole together. Thus their resultant position will be any where around you. Therefore, you can't position with ObjectReference.MoveTo. The command actually works but due to the "repelled action", the final position is not what you want if u wanna trigger paired animation manually.

 

There is also the issue of NPC in their own idle animation. You can probably restrain the NPC or turn off AI but just make the NPC stays is good enough. The NPC also need to face the player. Actor.PlayIdleWithTarget() does not sync or position anything so it basically Actor.PlayIdle() is good enough to player idle animation.

 

So you can see there are many issues trying to do the paired animation manually. Trying another approach, use 'furniture' to move 2 or more characters close together without "repelling". With marker on the furniture, you can position exactly where you want the characters to be. Once the characters enter the furniture, each respective idle animation can be triggered. The furniture can be made "invisible" if needed and the "wait" action removed if required.