Solved Walking as subscene animPat and using Timeline - best practices?

[atani]

Hi everyone,
Apologies if it has been asked a similar question, but it's difficult to search as it can be written in endless ways. I'm creating my first scenes and together also learning how to use Timeline by Acid Bubbles (amazing plugin ?). There's been lots of mistakes, redoing things, fixing a problem and creating 3 from that, you know the usual.
What is my goal? To have a system for making a person walk that can be used and adjusted easily on scenes and not be dependent on a fixed route or custom to a scene only.

I have a scene that has a person walking to a point. I thought at first to create it in Timeline but this cyclical motion turned out a bit wonky, difficult to adjust, and re-use on new scenes. I know there's a export/import in Timeline, super useful and I've used it, but I thought that perhaps I will have more flexibility if I instead set the walking to be a animation pattern as a subscene.
I created the walking subscene, a bit robotic now but not too bad, and it's easy to adjust and add to any new scene quickly ?. And so I fix one problem and create 3 more of course. How to combine this with timeline that will also have keyframes for limbs and hip so that timeline doesn't block the subscene animpatterns?

My first takes were to have in the person's Timeline this:

• layer for triggers and control
• layer for body parts like limbs, etc.

I could then set a route with control and triggers to sart/stop the subscene walking animpatterns. Playing the timeline worked ok, I would only trigger the layered anims I needed, but editing was hard because moving the time would be shared by all layers, so let's say moving the head to look right (layer body) at 3 sec would do it in the location where "control layer" was at 3 sec, in the wrong place. In playing all looked good because of the triggers, but editing was difficult.
So I tried having the "body layer" extended by the time taken by the other control layers (walking). This worked well for editing, but then playing of course goes too long. Not too bad since I could always trim the extended parts when I was done, but didn't feel right to work like this.
Briefly there was an attempt to have 2 timeline instaces in the person, but that brought all kinds of problems and felt like a bad way to things.

My latest take is to remove the control layer from above and instead create the walking route also using a animation pattern. This works, but I have a "walk in" pattern and a "walk out" pattern, and there's a problem I haven't resolved. When setting the first animpattern to handle the person > control, that's all good, but then if setting the other animpattern also to person > control, one blocks the other's actions. I was thinking that a trigger could at the end of the first anim could disable the setting for person > control on one and activate for the other, but I haven't found the way to define these options on the trigger actions. Any idea what it may be?

Perhaps in the end I should go back to create a loop in Timeline for the walking animation, but I also need to access the limbs and hip controls for other things, and would be good to have a easy system to use on new scenes. Any ideas on combining subscene movements with timeline, and a solution to the problem in the previous paragraph?

Thank you for reading through all of this, happy to share more details if unclear.

 

[atani]

Ok, I think I am going with a possible solution to what I want to do.
I'm going to set a animation pattern for the walk in and walk out. The walk in's last step has a trigger to make its AP off, freeing up control to be used in the timeline and later in walk out AP. The timeline animation now has a control target in it, and last keyframe turns on the walk out AP.
So far it seems to be working well and editing is easy, not sure why I didn't try that before, but maybe I did but missed something and gave poor results. Let's see how that goes.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

Nice! I'm looking forward to seeing what you're building!

I think it's also useful to know that I'm also working on a walking plugin (which is _not_ an animation plugin but rather a procedural walking plugin), if you're interested!

 

[atani]

Nice! I'm looking forward to seeing what you're building!

I think it's also useful to know that I'm also working on a walking plugin (which is _not_ an animation plugin but rather a procedural walking plugin), if you're interested!

Wow, you just keep bringing tools to VAM that no one can be without ?
Guess I'll have to resubscribe to you again soon

Creating this scene was an attempt to start understanding how animations work and having some reusable parts to use in further scenes without starting from scratch. Can't promise they'll be any good, definitely lots of work still to do in refining and testing. Once I'm done and checking that it fits the Hub's requirements, they'll be shared for free, always.

 

[atani]

Status update:
I've managed to get what I wanted, 2 AP with control and control in Timeline, toggling off the atomcontrol when done with the first AP, Timeline kicks in and in the end turns on the 2nd AP.

I had issues with the takeover from timeline to the 2nd AP. On the last keyframe there was a trigger to turn on the AP and another to reset and play but it wouldn't turn on the AP for some reason. The reason elludes me, I'm new at this, but this was resolved by turning on the AP atom 1 second before and the last keyframe only has the trigger to play the AP, and now it walks away ?