Adding Animations

[Tsuna]

Hey was just wondering does anyone here know or know anyone that can add extra animations into game? If anyone does please could you direct me to a tutorial cheers

[nfitc1]

Do you mean FF7? There is no tutorial for loads of reasons. It's completely possible, however. It's just no one has figured out how to make it work.

[Tsuna]

Yeah , my idea is i would like to add animations to bridge 2 together. For instance dieng in battle. A transition from alive to dead rather than just dropping. This would also work if if you could select a specific frame to begin looping from and and just add the extra part in at the start

[obesebear]

Your best chance for that is to find the death animation, and duplicate the very first frame.  From there you'll have to manually edit the very first frame so that Cloud looks like he does in his idle animation.  Once you've got that finished, you can try to click the interpolate animation button which will add a halfway frame.  You'll then have to manually edit that one so it actually looks like halfway between idle and death.   From there you should be able to click interpolate animation freely to make it look as smooth as you want.

However, don't think this is as easy as it may sound.  As soon as you get started, you'll see what I mean.  Kimera isn't designed for extensive animation edits like this.

[Tsuna]

Yeah i get all that but eventually the animation will reach an end and restart as him standing again if left dead too wont it?

[Kaldarasha]

Yeah i get all that but eventually the animation will reach an end and restart as him standing again if left dead too wont it?

That will proberly be the problem, but there is no other way to do it.

To add an animation you have to edit the character's battle animation list and his battle AI as well. We have no tools for the first and I'm pretty sure it is very hard to edit the battle AI for this.

[obesebear]

It might be that a simple edit of the **ab file could prevent the death animations from looping, but I'm not positive.  I don't know enough about the file to be sure.

[nfitc1]

No. Death animations are static and only contained in the exe. There are only a few to choose from.

[Tsuna]

I was thinking maybe it's not like this. Im going to try convert this from thought to text but it might not make sense.
We have an alive and a death animation, yeah that's grand. In the script they have for this somewhere will it not say something along along the lines of (all i know is JavaScript) If alive play animation ... if dead play animation ... when animation = finished stop loop.
Because when you are dead there isn't any movement, there cant be hence no animation playing its just a rag-doll right? so adding the fall to the beginning of the death wont loop. Or at least im hoping

[nfitc1]

I was thinking maybe it's not like this. Im going to try convert this from thought to text but it might not make sense.
We have an alive and a death animation, yeah that's grand. In the script they have for this somewhere will it not say something along along the lines of (all i know is JavaScript) If alive play animation ... if dead play animation ... when animation = finished stop loop.
Because when you are dead there isn't any movement, there cant be hence no animation playing its just a rag-doll right? so adding the fall to the beginning of the death wont loop. Or at least im hoping

You know why this is wrong? Because it makes sense.

What actually happens is:
"Alive = visible & process idle animation script"
"Dead = invisible (for enemies only) & don't process animation"

However, EVERYONE goes back to the first frame of their current idle animation when one animation is marked as finished. The defeated enemies are actually still there holding on frame 0 of their idle animation. The graphics engine is just told to not draw them.

This doesn't apply to player characters, however. They just set their idle animation to a single frame animation of them lying face down. In theory they could be told to play a different animation before going to this pose. It probably wouldn't be too hard a re-write, but it would look rather weird with the graphics engine only processing one animation at a time.

[Tsuna]

Damn i thought i was onto something there. See i cant do any of this getting into the heart of the game and scripting it and stuff but give me animations to do and id love too.