Anyone using Final IK with AC?

Snebjorn

Eyes glued there already! :-)

Snebjorn

Finally (ha-ha) got around to testing Final IK with AC, and I'm quite impressed!

Here's a quick comparison of the same character in the same scene without and with Final IK. Default settings throughout, and just 1 idle and 1 walking animation: https://youtu.be/lhBKLJWIQNU

Snebjorn

And before anyone starts laughing too hard: I used to work with a guy who walked on stairs exactly like that - and that was absolutely fine, because we worked in R&D - so there! 

themightyzq

Hooray!

Yeah - I noticed some sort of "hyper-extending" of my characters' joints like that as well.  I backed the overall output of the Grounder settings to 0.5 from 1, that seemed to give me a pretty nice happy medium.  There are still moments where the legs go a little wonky, but it definitely feels rooted in the world.

I was using some of the additional spine options but noticed that on player start that the character would do this really weird "settling".  It looked like it was placing the feet grounder at a high velocity and then the rest of the body would "smoosh" down and then stand upright.

Snebjorn

Final IK definitely belongs in the "tweak-o-rama" category - but my thinking is that if you find that "nice happy medium" and combine it with smart use of animations and take all this into account when designing scenes, you would need an army of animators (and gameplay programmers) to compete with it.

Will try out the interaction system tomorrow and see how that goes ...

themightyzq

Yeah, I still need to go down the rabbit hole with the interaction system.  It's unclear to me right now how to bridge that with AC pretty solidly.

I also picked up Skele to use in conjunction with Final IK.  

Pretty damn good time to be an indie dev.

Snebjorn

Definitely!

Coming up with the really good original design ideas is as hard as ever, but some of the stuff you can get from the asset store really saves months or years on the technical side.

Oh yeah, Skele ... it has been sitting at the top of my "Check This Out" list on my Trello board for a while now. Have you done anything with it yet?

themightyzq

I haven't yet...it went on sale last week at 50% off, so I just grabbed it.  It's $16.00 right now!

Snebjorn

Up early this morning, so had the chance to play a bit with the interaction system. Extremely cool, but it looks like some clever scripting is required to make it integrate well with AC. It would probably be worth the effort to create some generic scripts for stuff like opening doors and picking up small objects, but I'll need to experiment a bit more before attempting that.

Unfortunately, now it's time to go off to Meeting Hell, AKA The Day Job ...

Snebjorn

Okay, we have liftoff: https://youtu.be/3uyWoqLYzK4

Snebjorn

As it turned out, calling a Final IK interaction from an action list wasn't really hard at all. I may polish it a bit over the next couple of days and maybe add a few extra options to the custom action, and then I'll post it here.

themightyzq

NICE.  Excellent work, @Snebjorn!!  

2finger

Yep, great job @Snebjorn! 

Cool baguette!  >-

Snebjorn

Thanks - I expect to post the custom action I'm using for this tonight.

What's really cool about this system is that once you've set up an interaction, you can keep tweaking weight curves, interaction targets and multipliers while playing in the editor until it looks exactly right - and then return later and tweak it even more! :-B

And the documentation it absolutely top notch!

GeometriX

This is some inspirational stuff, Snebjorn (btw is that "snow bear" in Icelandic?)!

I'm curious as to how "accessible" this level of animation is to a non-animator like myself. I must say that the animation looks very realistic; how challenging has it been for you to get up to this level? Where did you get that character model from, or is it your own creation?

I'm currently working on a first-person game with very little character interaction, but I'm interested for future games: Ideally I'd like to use a Mixamo Fuse character with Final IK: do you think that's something that's doable?

Sorry for the random questions: I've been considering Final IK for sometime and you seem like the best person to ask!

Snebjorn

Well, if you want to go with Mixamo - you're in luck! 

The model I've used for these demos is actually a Fuse character using a couple of Mixamo's free animations. Took less than 30 mins to put together and get him working in AC.

I'm currently using mostly Fuse characters as placeholders in my main project, but the plan is to have everything modeled from scratch and then use the brilliant animations by Kubold (available from the asset store) as the basis for more specialised animations.

Animation is fun, but extremely time consuming! I can do reasonable animations now, but it's taken horrendous amounts of hours to get to this point. Modifying standard animations is in my opinion a much smarter approach for small teams or single developers.

And yes, you're right about my name - though it's Danish/Faroese - but from the old Norse "Snøybiǫrn", meaning "snow bear".

GeometriX

Thanks, that's very helpful. I think I'll stick with Mixamo's animation collection for now then! 

And thanks for the mention of Kubold; his stuff really looks fantastic.

Snebjorn

Alright, here's the code for my custom action for running Final IK interactions. Probably not the final version, but at least a starting point:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6457013/FinalIK_RunInteraction.cs

Run at your own risk et cetera ...

Will expand with more options and actions as I start using Final IK in my project (Hey, I was working on a game back there somewhere, wasn't I???) and will try to incorporate any feedback.

Too tired tonight for any new stuff, but plan to see what Skele does tomorrow.

Snebjorn

Tin Pot looking completely stumped:

... but the console output gives a clue:

FinalIK_RunInteraction: No InteractionSystem found on Player.

UnityEngine.Debug:LogWarning(Object)

Snebjorn

And remember to set the correct effector in the action:

https://youtu.be/-V6D3nnaPIQ