Answered Could someone advise me how to get animations of picking up and using objects to look good?

[Origin69]

I've planned animating a scene where a person picks up and interacts with several CUA objects (picking up, putting down, and passing from hand to hand) and I'm struggling a bit with the object and characters hand positions.

If I start an animation with the object in hand with the ParentholdLink plugin active it looks great, but I'm struggling to pickup and put down objects mid animation. I'm assuming activating ParentholdLink by trigger in timeline, is the way to do this?

Could someone experienced in timeline and animating interactions with cua's please give me a quick run down of the simplest way/ best practice to achieve smooth animations like this.

 

[atani]

You can do parenting per animation in Timeline, giving a much more flexible control than standard VaM would allow. As these are per animation, my suggestion would be to arrange your animations (starting/ending) around these object pick-up/drop changes.

Controller settings screen

Advanced and intuitive keyframe animations for Virt-A-Mate - acidbubbles/vam-timeline

github.com

Other options exist, not counting the ones I don't know about, my suggestion may not be the best suited to your needs.

 

[MacGruber]

Don't know enough about Timeline's parenting feature mentioned by atani. So that may be or not be viable.

However, some ages ago I build this example using ParentHoldLink. Make sure to use my modified version, not the original by Blazedust:

Asset Binding

Hilfe wird hier leider sehr klein geschrieben, aber ich versuche es trotzdem nochmal. Gibt es eine Möglichkeit, ein Asset manuell zu binden, mit der Timeline, zum Beispiel ein Handy usw. Ich weiß, wie man ein Asset bindet, aber dann hat die Person es immer in der Hand, ich möchte, dass die...

hub.virtamate.com

The example is using IdlePoser for animation, but using Timeline should work, too.

 

[Origin69]

Thank you, both of you. I did some testing last night and I was able to get some fairly good results with parenting by animation.

It's still frustrating, but I suppose that's just me rushing, and my lack of skill in animating.

I thought swearing at inanimate objects in the real world was bad, but at-least those are tangible and you can throw them across the room when you get annoyed. Picking it up and throwing it in virtual reality wouldn't scratch that itch.

 

[Matt_]

I've planned animating a scene where a person picks up and interacts with several CUA objects (picking up, putting down, and passing from hand to hand) and I'm struggling a bit with the object and characters hand positions.

If I start an animation with the object in hand with the ParentholdLink plugin active it looks great, but I'm struggling to pickup and put down objects mid animation. I'm assuming activating ParentholdLink by trigger in timeline, is the way to do this?

Could someone experienced in timeline and animating interactions with cua's please give me a quick run down of the simplest way/ best practice to achieve smooth animations like this.

Look at my ball asset, in unity add physics to it and make a CUA. Then you can interact with ut in vam

 

[Origin69]

Look at my ball asset, in unity add physics to it and make a CUA. Then you can interact with ut in vam

Thanks Matt, but physics for the cua's wasn't the issue I was having, it was the actual parenting of objects to have the character pick up and manipulate them from one hand to the other. Parenting per animation in Timeline seems to work.

 

[upwardpuddle]

Any updates on this? How well does timeline work for parenting objects when you are running multiple sequences? I’ve been finding I have issues which I assume are do to frames missing when I have one of these animations cued after another one plays. It seems to work fine when I play an animation with parent links by itself, but not in between other animations.

 

[Origin69]

Any updates on this? How well does timeline work for parenting objects when you are running multiple sequences? I’ve been finding I have issues which I assume are do to frames missing when I have one of these animations cued after another one plays. It seems to work fine when I play an animation with parent links by itself, but not in between other animations.

I kind of gave up on the original scene where I was trying to get this to work properly. I'm going to be trying again in my latest project, so I'll update you if i figure out anything useful.

 

[upwardpuddle]

Okay, good luck. Just throwing ideas out there, but you can also try adding a second cua that is the same object but always parented to the hand that gets turned on by a trigger. I’ll try to find a minute to try that myself and post a vid if I get any good results

 

[MacGruber]

Okay, good luck. Just throwing ideas out there, but you can also try adding a second cua that is the same object but always parented to the hand that gets turned on by a trigger. I’ll try to find a minute to try that myself and post a vid if I get any good results

If you want to attach a CUA to multiple attachment points, just use multiple ParentHoldLink plugins and turn on the right one each time.

 

[Matt_]

What were you trying to move...can you send it to me or post a screenshot

 

[upwardpuddle]

I'm not really able to post a vid of this so I created a simple scene for it. If anyone's interested in digging in there and giving their opinion on how it's a decent solution (or isn't) I'm all ears.

 

[DarkFantasy]

After exploring several avenues over the years, (with many "FUCK, GD it!"'s ), this is what I have found:
- parenting in Timeline is good until it isn't. There are many situations where it will lose whatever is tying the animation to the asset and you will need to redo it. Great for simple things. Not so great where there are dozens of animations. For example, there are some scenarios where swapping subscenes sometimes causes this loss.

This is what I do now. It is probably not optimal but it seems to be stable over time:
Example: phone with a flash to "take pictures" with

Locations:
- in hand and on the floor/desk/etc depending upon the animation

Actions:
- pick up
- drop
- throw
- set down
- take pictures/video

Assets:
- custom asset - Phone1
+ add-ons: parentholdlink, timeline
+ parented light (configured as "spot")
- Invisible light (attach to Phone1)
+ Add-ons: timeline; parentholdlink
- custom asset - Phone2
+ add-ons: timeline

Setup:
Phone1:
Attach light to phone1
Attach Phone1 to the hand

Light:
Set to intensity 2 or higher and play with range
Setup flash animations in timeline. (Turn light on and off quickly)
(Attach to Phone1)

Phone2:
Duplicate of phone 1 used for animations in space

How to use:
Pick up phone and take pictures:
Animation to reach for and pick up phone2
When hand is over it turn phone 1 on and phone2 off
Call the flash animations when you want a flash

Throw the phone:
Use the same segment and animation name in Phones
Turn Phone1 off and Phone2 on
Use timeline to animate the phone to it's final resting place (can use multiple random paths using "anim/#"


With some creative tweaking you can usually hide the swap pretty well.

I hope this makes sense. Also, I am wide open to any better ideas or tweaks, (or, "you are an idiot, you can simply do it this way...")! There are so many options, plugin options, etc that it is hard to determine the best and most optimal solution and that is one of the things that makes VAM fun. There is no end to the tweaking and optimization!

 

[upwardpuddle]

After exploring several avenues over the years, (with many "FUCK, GD it!"'s ), this is what I have found:
- parenting in Timeline is good until it isn't. There are many situations where it will lose whatever is tying the animation to the asset and you will need to redo it. Great for simple things. Not so great where there are dozens of animations. For example, there are some scenarios where swapping subscenes sometimes causes this loss.

This is what I do now. It is probably not optimal but it seems to be stable over time:
Example: phone with a flash to "take pictures" with

Locations:
- in hand and on the floor/desk/etc depending upon the animation

Actions:
- pick up
- drop
- throw
- set down
- take pictures/video

Assets:
- custom asset - Phone1
+ add-ons: parentholdlink, timeline
+ parented light (configured as "spot")
- Invisible light (attach to Phone1)
+ Add-ons: timeline; parentholdlink
- custom asset - Phone2
+ add-ons: timeline

Setup:
Phone1:
Attach light to phone1
Attach Phone1 to the hand

Light:
Set to intensity 2 or higher and play with range
Setup flash animations in timeline. (Turn light on and off quickly)
(Attach to Phone1)

Phone2:
Duplicate of phone 1 used for animations in space

How to use:
Pick up phone and take pictures:
Animation to reach for and pick up phone2
When hand is over it turn phone 1 on and phone2 off
Call the flash animations when you want a flash

Throw the phone:
Use the same segment and animation name in Phones
Turn Phone1 off and Phone2 on
Use timeline to animate the phone to it's final resting place (can use multiple random paths using "anim/#"


With some creative tweaking you can usually hide the swap pretty well.

I hope this makes sense. Also, I am wide open to any better ideas or tweaks, (or, "you are an idiot, you can simply do it this way...")! There are so many options, plugin options, etc that it is hard to determine the best and most optimal solution and that is one of the things that makes VAM fun. There is no end to the tweaking and optimization!

Thank you for explaining. This is what I have found as well. And that’s exactly why it’s so frustrating. “It works well until it doesn’t” Haha. I’ve kind of reverted to just animating the CUA manually in timeline matching it with whatever movement I’m trying to get. I’ve had some luck using timeline to animate the object’s Rotation and leaving the position parented to whatever atom I’m using. It works surprisingly well if you want the cua to stay on the atom most of the time.