High Quality Animations Project

[Dortold]

EDIT: quoting image for newpage.

Again, excellent looking work. That new chaingunner animation makes me want to duck to one side of my computer monitor! I like how he squares his shoulders as he's lifting the chaingun, but it seems there's a frame in between gun-down & gun-up where the shoulder of the arm that's holding the ammo belt pops out slightly - it's a bit distracting. Random idea: How do you think it would look if he moved his feet while aiming, as if he were planting them in place? So his feet start out side-by-side, but he moved one back to brace for the recoil of firing the chaingun. Just an idea; maybe it wouldn't synch up well with his other animations, though.

Xtyfe mentioned adding additional rotations on the last page. This would be very exciting, however the work involved in adding these would be massive. Basically more than doubling your work if you don't get any help. But I thought I'd repeat the question, because hey, this is Mark we're talking about here. Any thoughts on adding these down the line?

[GooberMan]

Gooberman, if your post was not a joke, then I assume that it was an insult.

If you don't like the project and has no criticism to provide, that's fine, but please keep your pointless posts out of here. Thanks.

If you don't want to read my posts properly, then cool, get butthurt. Wouldn't be the first time someone's overreacted on the internet.

If you actually want to understand where I'm coming from, then calm down and look at what I said on a technical level (which, to be clear, is pretty much every word in those posts).

That chaingunner? Yep. Each frame looks like a linear interpolation from one frame to the next. Are you going to tell me you didn't pick a few spots at exact percentage marks between the first and last frames to do your work?

It looks like it's doing a lerp because that's exactly how you tackled it. And it's the wrong way to tackle it if you're doing animation. One of the basic principles of animation is slow in and slow out. Or, more specifically, for a chaingunner to get from gun down to gun up the way you've done it, he would not move in a linear fashion. His arm movement would be more akin to a sin curve. This is the exact point where HDTV frame interpolation fails - it linearly interpolates (ie moves in a straight line) between frames. Even with algorithms such as optical flow, it creates straight up unnatural movement, and that's exactly what's going on here.

Blox and Enjay have tried to explain that point. This is exactly in detail what they're getting at. If you find that pointless, well, good luck to you sir.

[Captain J]

oh holy hell, you're making doom into a such a 32 bit masterpiece!
gotta put a book mark.

[Sergeant_Mark_IV]

That chaingunner? Yep. Each frame looks like a linear interpolation from one frame to the next. Are you going to tell me you didn't pick a few spots at exact percentage marks between the first and last frames to do your work?

It looks like it's doing a lerp because that's exactly how you tackled it. And it's the wrong way to tackle it if you're doing animation. One of the basic principles of animation is slow in and slow out. Or, more specifically, for a chaingunner to get from gun down to gun up the way you've done it, he would not move in a linear fashion. His arm movement would be more akin to a sin curve. This is the exact point where HDTV frame interpolation fails - it linearly interpolates (ie moves in a straight line) between frames. Even with algorithms such as optical flow, it creates straight up unnatural movement, and that's exactly what's going on here.

Blox and Enjay have tried to explain that point. This is exactly in detail what they're getting at. If you find that pointless, well, good luck to you sir.

First explain me why would he need to make a curve? Just to make it look more fancy? What makes you think this? In the way he was already carrying the weapon, there is absolutely no need to make a curved animation.
About the animation speed, I already did what Enjay told about the Demon bite animation. Also, I will first make the sprites, and care about the tic duration of each frame later.

[wildweasel]

Hey, just FYI, reporting someone's post is not the way to respond to criticism.

[GooberMan]

First explain me why would he need to make a curve? Just to make it look more fancy? What makes you think this?

Because it's a basic principle that all professionals adhere to in order to provide the high quality animations you see in film and video games.

I'll tell you what. Record yourself lifting up a stand-in prop for a chaingun. Then compare it to your animation. Play a game of spot the difference yourself. Then get back to me.

[XutaWoo]

It's the principle that weasel explained in this article of his, in section 3. Real organisms don't move roboticly and instead their limbs accelerate and decelerate to get into position. So, in the Chaingunner animation, a more fluid animation would start with short movements between each individual frame, then speed up linearly or quadraticly to larger movements, before slowly down again to small movements. Perhaps with him overshooting and having to adjust the chaingun's position slightly so that it wasn't aiming a bit upwards.

I don't really care that much about this, because the resolution and the nature of DOOM suspends my disbelief enough, but GooberMan nonetheless has valid criticism. For certain, if you were making these at a higher resolution, the unrealistic smoothness would both more people, too.

[Sergeant_Mark_IV]

Hey, just FYI, reporting someone's post is not the way to respond to criticism.

Even if it has an agressive tone? The last time I called someone "butthurt" I got a warning.

I'll tell you what. Record yourself lifting up a stand-in prop for a chaingun. Then compare it to your animation. Play a game of spot the difference yourself. Then get back to me.

Well, the minigun model in Doom doesn't exists. Miniguns are not designed like that, therefore can't be carried how the Chaingunner carries his gun. But let's use a simpler subject as example: a domestic gun. I did what you said, and holded my rifle in front of the mirror the same way the chainguguy holds his position during his See animations to try to see what's the best way to raise the weapon to the firing stance on his missile animation. Guess what? The linear movement is much better. First because doing a curved movement caused horizontal momentum at the end, making me have to spend a half-second more to realign the weapon. Second, the curved movement could make the barrel hit something in a more busy place, resulting in more waste of time to realign the weapon to the target. So, your arguments makes no sense, the chaingunner can perfectly raise his weapon in a linear movement.

[CaptainToenail]

He means a curve in the timing of the animation, not a literal curve of movement.

As to the project, much better idea than the HD sprites... but I still believe if anyone is to 'improve' Doom's graphics then they really ought to just go the whole way with a new graphics engine and resources. Of course that's not very likely realistic either.

[GooberMan]

Well, the minigun model in Doom doesn't exists.

Hence why it's called a "stand in prop." Another thing professionals use.

A bunch of ill-conceived home tests that would get you laughed out of any animation job interview.

Look, it's quite clear that you don't understand basic animation principles. Movement between one value and another using a sine curve does not mean wobble your weapon out in whacky positions. Here's a sine curve:



It is using a two-dimensional representation to illustrate how one value fed in to the sine function relates to the value returned from it. Now, as you can see, the progression of the sine function between any two values is not linear:



How does this all relate to animation between frames? Pretty simple. The input to a linear function and a sine function here is the time between two frames, normalised to a value between 0% and 100%. If you want to make a frame 25% between two frames, a linear function would return 25%. However, the sine function would not return 25%. To get a smooth curve out of the sine function, you'd alter the input to provide a value to sine that would return a range between -1 and 1, and then normalise that value to be between 0 and 1. At the end of the day, the input of 25% would return 14.64%. That's a full 10% from the original linear value plus change. Thus, inserting three frames between your first and last frame of animation would ask you to make frames 14.64%, 50%, and 85.36% of the way between them and display them at a constant linear rate. Which is quite a difference from 25%, 50%, and 75% at a constant linear rate.

This should also make quite apparent the flaw to simply altering the frame duration. To match the output that a sine curve would bring, you'd have to hold that 25% frame off much longer, and the gap between the 50% and 75% frame would be much shorter. Since you're altering the temporal playback of it, it will then result in jerky animations.

And I think we can all agree jerky animations are a far cry away from "high quality".

This is all basic stuff that I suggest you study in more detail if you actually want to hit your goal of high quality. Sure, the number of posts in this thread saying that what you've got now looks great is an argument for keeping them as they are. But that's not improving your skill set, nor is it (or any of the justifications you've tried using) going to help your work pass any kind of professional quality test - which you really should be aiming for if you want them to be high quality animations used instead of the stock Doom ones.

[Lance]

I think a simpler way of saying it would be to 'ease' out the animations. xD

[Matt]

Just wanted to comment on an earlier point:

The imp "pauses" with every step because its an attempt to make a more realistic movement. It worked with the Zombieman and Demon, but seems like its not as good with imps. I will remove.

I tried this exact same thing many years ago and it never, ever looked right. You don't really pause when your foot hits the ground when you walk, you're just using forward momentum and getting ready for the next step while the ground foot rolls forward as it trails behind the rest of you/pushes the rest of you forward.

Incidentally, I've been listening to this

while reading the thread and every single gif looks like it's dancing to it :V

[GooberMan]

I think a simpler way of saying it would be to 'ease' out the animations. xD

Hah, yes. Quoted for truth.

(I deal with this stuff at a low level every day at work. It's hard for me to not be technical.)

[Sergeant_Mark_IV]

You know that you could have explained before that you were talking about the animation acceleration, and not the animation itself, and skipped this whole discussion? I think you should learn how to express yourself better.

And... as I already mentioned earlier, the duration of tics are something to be edited later. And again I say, I already did what Enjay said on his post to reduce the duration of frames during his mid close/open frames, and it worked, and I will do it with other frames.

[wildweasel]

I don't think this was the time or place for a Picard facepalm. I thought Goober's post was quite readable; maybe you should have re-read it a few times, maybe asked him about things that you didn't understand, instead of assuming he meant something else and telling him "no."