Game Physics and Mechanics | Forums

[Tesseract]

Today was a slow day at work, and that invariably lends itself to flights of fancy.

I found myself recalling the slight annoyance I experienced recently with 'realistic' humanoid character models. Now there are a few obvious things that people tend to get hung up on... Skin tone, facial motion, body motion... But in this case, I was noticing that when the character on-screen sat down on the ground, the skin around her midriff did not wrinkle as one would expect from a real-life effect.

So I was trying to think of an Idea that might address this problem, and I think I have one, but I'd like to know if it's good or just simply impossible to implement correctly.... Would it be possible to make a meatbag?

Ahem... to be a little more specific... Clothing effects have improved fairly well over the last few years. The thought is to make a skeletal/muscular model, and then use a leathery clothing effect to tighly wrap around it. With today's processing power, this could even be advanced to the point of starting with a young model, and having a program rapidly simulate general motions and movements to calculate where wrinkles would eventually develop on an older person.

The only major problem that I could initially think of is that collision detection on cloth and other such effects tends to be wretched. Noone wants to accidentally have a character twist the wrong way and have a deltoid exposed. The skin 'bag' would have to be tight enough to the skeletal structure to approximate a proper effect, yet have nearly flawless collision detection.

So.... what do you think? Is this something that could work, or is it just a pipe dream at this point? I also invite other questions having to do with the nitty-gritty of how game AI and physics and geometry and whatever might work.

Who knows.... We might inspire you again, neko! ^^

[Tesseract]

Today was a slow day at work, and that invariably lends itself to flights of fancy.

I found myself recalling the slight annoyance I experienced recently with 'realistic' humanoid character models. Now there are a few obvious things that people tend to get hung up on... Skin tone, facial motion, body motion... But in this case, I was noticing that when the character on-screen sat down on the ground, the skin around her midriff did not wrinkle as one would expect from a real-life effect.

So I was trying to think of an Idea that might address this problem, and I think I have one, but I'd like to know if it's good or just simply impossible to implement correctly.... Would it be possible to make a meatbag?

Ahem... to be a little more specific... Clothing effects have improved fairly well over the last few years. The thought is to make a skeletal/muscular model, and then use a leathery clothing effect to tighly wrap around it. With today's processing power, this could even be advanced to the point of starting with a young model, and having a program rapidly simulate general motions and movements to calculate where wrinkles would eventually develop on an older person.

The only major problem that I could initially think of is that collision detection on cloth and other such effects tends to be wretched. Noone wants to accidentally have a character twist the wrong way and have a deltoid exposed. The skin 'bag' would have to be tight enough to the skeletal structure to approximate a proper effect, yet have nearly flawless collision detection.

So.... what do you think? Is this something that could work, or is it just a pipe dream at this point? I also invite other questions having to do with the nitty-gritty of how game AI and physics and geometry and whatever might work.

Who knows.... We might inspire you again, neko! ^^

[AvianAbsolute]

Let's not ask for too much .

[frd_neko]

Yes, you're right in that your suggested method could conceivably be used to create the effect you're talking about. But the problem is that such methods are massively processor-intensive. The vast majority of ingame physics you see in games these days is known as 'rigid body' physics - things like crates, barrels, cars, etc. Even 'ragdoll' physics (most often seen applied to corpses) are simply a series of rigidbody objects joined by hinges where the joints in the body are, and even rag dolls are extremely hard to get right without them either occasionally glitching or looking odd.

When you start to talk about human skin or clothing, you're starting to talk about the physics of a 'soft body' object. This is an object that can fold and stretch, the biggest problem with which is that it can be made to collide with itself (an easy example is if you were to fold a mattress in half; the 'inner' surfaces collide with one another without intersecting), and can also be made to do so in an almost infinite variety of ways by folding and stretching it along different axes. This is simply very expensive to calculate, although not impossible.

You're right about the realism of characters in games though - one of my biggest gripes with pretty much all next-gen games I've played is that while the quality of the graphics has taken a considerable leap forward, the quality of animation hasn't taken a similarly large step. This has long been the case, particularly with western developers who commonly have always seen animation as a lower priority thing than graphics, which is a surprising approach in some ways given that the one thing humans can empathise with more than anything else is other humans. In other words, the more realistic your characters, the more compelling the game.

I think at FRD we prioritise animation much more than many other developers, comparing the animation in any of our titles to similar, competing games and I think the fluidity and range of movements our characters have is really strong. And that's something we're continuing with HAZE, except to an even higher level of complexity (we have a full facial animation system now, for instance, which means that in-game you can turn to a squadmate who's talking to you and you'll see his whole face animating to match the speech. You can even often read their mood purely from their expression!). But even so, I think that with the animation in HAZE we've achieved maybe 10% of what I think we can do with ingame animation, and it's certainly one of the areas I'm most interested in working on improving in future titles.

Neko.

[cob_shaw]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by frd_neko:

I think at FRD we prioritise animation much more than many other developers, comparing the animation in any of our titles to similar, competing games and I think the fluidity and range of movements our characters have is really strong. And that's something we're continuing with HAZE, except to an even higher level of complexity (we have a full facial animation system now, for instance, which means that in-game you can turn to a squadmate who's talking to you and you'll see his whole face animating to match the speech. You can even often read their mood purely from their expression!). But even so, I think that with the animation in HAZE we've achieved maybe 10% of what I think we can do with ingame animation, and it's certainly one of the areas I'm most interested in working on improving in future titles.

Neko. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

*drools* That sounds awesome!

[Xylaquin]

Deded, Neko and Cob_shaw driving through in a buggy:
<div class="ev_tpc_signature">


When TS3.net closed, a lot of members moved to another forum ran by one of the Mods.

[deded999]

You got me just right...<div class="ev_tpc_signature">

[cob_shaw]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Xylaquin:
Deded, Neko and Cob_shaw driving through in a buggy:
</div></BLOCKQUOTE>

I'm not sure if thats an insult or a compliment but lol!

[C_Marcussen]

LOL - where is that image from?

Anyway, speaking of animation - FRD have always impressed me with their animation. Take the cutscenes from TS:FP - great animating there.

Needless to say, the animation for Haze will great!

[frd_neko]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Xylaquin:
Deded, Neko and Cob_shaw driving through in a buggy:
</div></BLOCKQUOTE>

It's kinda like that, except with more shooting.

Neko.