I am not sure if this is a bug, so before posting it under bughunt I decided to try here.



These entity at left is running a bone animation, and the one at right is blending 50% between 2 bone animations. I have 2 problems with this scene.

First, the obvious problem that the blend is causing some odd scaling. For example, the very small hand on the model at right.

Second, a less obvious glitch: actually, there's some scaling distortion even in the single animation at left. If you pay attention you can see the head being distorted, somewhat like pulsating.

I think these problems could be connected.

My animations don't even include scale keyframes. If I convert them to points animations, I won't have the pulsating distortion or the small hand, but of course I won't have the full functionality of anm_add and ent_blend.

Using either ent_blend or ent_blendpose causes this problem.

Is there something wrong with my models? You can download a 'demo' complete with models and scripts HERE.

Thanks for your help!

|Emilio|

I also have a movie to show this problem.
The hand looks like a piece of paper after the ent_blend.. and the head looks like if it was under water.

please watch the movie here


|Emilio|

Is there something wrong with my model wrong? or..
is it remotely possible that ent_blend and ent_blendpose is blending (averaging) vertices instead of bone angles? because I get the most distortion at ent_blend(...,...,50) (half way the blend...) but almost no distortion near the edges (10%, 90%). And I can see I get similar distortion with a copy of the model in VERTEX animation.

Oh well, that is some light then... (dark light perhaps?)

Well, at least I know what to expect now.
What do you suggest as blending code? Copying bone rotations and etc. from one pose to another? would that be possible?


EDIT:
I found this in the manual, in ent_blendpose, remarks:
"Blending by linear interpolation computes intermediate vertex positions rather than intermediate bones angles. Thus it produces the best results when the bones angles of source and target pose are not too different, like less than 90 degrees. "

That is exactly what is happening. However, I am using ent_blend and not ent_blendpose.

In ent_blend, the manual says:
"For bones scenes, the instruction does not alter frame and next_frame, but blends the entity's skeleton between the scenes. Only bones affected by the given scene are moved. Several bones animations can be blended by executing this instruction several times for different animation scenes that can even affect the same sets of bones (see ent_animate example)..."

is this still valid? it seems to me that ent_blend blends vertices just the same way as ent_blendpose.

need... sleep...



|Emilio|

#1 in my master list(in my signature) has some blending code(animation.wdl). It's only set up for base(standing still), still(an idle animation), walk, run, left and right turning but it smoothly blends from one mode to another.

Thanks a lot, Orange Brat! Your contributions are always great.
I had given a quick look at the code (since I spent some days searching everything about blending), but I didn't know I would need it so bad now. I'm going to study it right away.


|Emilio|