animation physics

[eosteric]

so I've been reading udk documentation on animation and physics and understand you can have for instance - as said in the documentation - a ponytail or coat under the laws of physics so they flab about and stuff

but what about say you wanted to make a snowboard or skateboard game, if you see ea's skate as an example of physics and animation is linked to create the realistic motion. so the reaction after dropping from certain heights, landing at a certain angle, etc, looks natural, and to some extent even controlling if the character will fall over or not

or maybe something simpler, a character jumping down from a height, how far down he bends his knees when he lands, etc,

[ffejnosliw]

I would think physical animation could be used for your examples. You can set up angular drives to force the physical bodies to try to keep their orientation while having some give and you can explicitly control the amount of influence the physical simulation has over the animation. It may not be a simple thing to set up and get right, but I don't see why you couldn't do it.

[eosteric]

good tip, I will try this as well

[ffejnosliw]

Here: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/PhysicalAnimation.html

[eosteric]

yeah thats among what i've been reading but i didn't find exactly what i needed or think i need, or how to translate that to what i need.

[geodav]

take a look at the hoverboard code that might help you

[BigSquid]

take a look at the hoverboard code that might help you

Yes, that's a good idea. For a skateboard, I'm not sure if you would want to start from PHYS_Walking (like a walking human player) or PHYS_RigidBody (like a vehicle), but in either case you should be able to attach a 'physics' player to it to get some response on landing etc. You'll probably need to play with the physics/anim blend depending on what you are doing - crazy tricks may mess up the character physics a bit!

The biggest headache with this is making sure things are in the correct tick groups, so the board position is updated before physics is run (ie PreAsyncWork), so you avoid 'frame behind' lag between the player and board.