Answered

Is it possible to reduce variation in entire curves?

Anonymous 4 years ago updated 4 years ago 2

I'm relatively new to this, but I'm not asking for a tutorial!  I'm just not familiar enough with animating to be sure by reading UMotion's feature list.  To explain my needs, basically, I have a nice mocapped idle animation that I need to use in a VR game that by nature immobilizes the head/hands/feet of the character.  That means that the animation's movements make the body look a little jerky, since those parts don't follow along.


So, what I'm hoping to do is proportionally flatten the animation curves, to normalize them and reduce those movements.


Is this possible with UMotion Community or Pro?  I don't need a long explanation, since there's surely documentation to help with that part.  But I'm wary of digging through a tool I don't fully understand looking for a solution that might not exist.


Thanks so much!

UMotion Version:
Unity Version:

Answer

Answer
Answered

Hi,

thank you very much for your support request.

From a game design perspective, I would recommend to completely decouple the VR camera (VR head) from the animated head bone so that the variations of the idle animation don't add artificial movement to the VR camera (this is going to make players nauseous). Jerky camera movement can make even the most experienced VR users nauseous (see climbing physics of "Boneworks").

In UMotion, you could scale down the curves to reduce the variations (make sure that your rotation curves are in euler rotation mode for this to work). Just select all keys of an animation curve, then use the box tool (i.e. the blue bar appearing next to the selected keys) to scale down the curve.

You are going to need UMotion Pro to import an existing animation.

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

Answer
Answered

Hi,

thank you very much for your support request.

From a game design perspective, I would recommend to completely decouple the VR camera (VR head) from the animated head bone so that the variations of the idle animation don't add artificial movement to the VR camera (this is going to make players nauseous). Jerky camera movement can make even the most experienced VR users nauseous (see climbing physics of "Boneworks").

In UMotion, you could scale down the curves to reduce the variations (make sure that your rotation curves are in euler rotation mode for this to work). Just select all keys of an animation curve, then use the box tool (i.e. the blue bar appearing next to the selected keys) to scale down the curve.

You are going to need UMotion Pro to import an existing animation.

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

Ahh, that all makes sense.  And you have a point about the camera, I'll do that. As I said, very new.  The game isn't anything complex, but I don't wanna do it halfway if I'm going to do it at all, haha.  Thanks so much.