Override Blending Time

rxmarcus

I have an interesting situation I'm hoping I can get some guidance on.
My character does an Idle animation where he animates up and down, including his gun.
When the player sends input on the controller there is an override bone on the gun so it follows the direction of the joystick as the player aims. When the player fires his weapon, projectiles fire from a bone at the tip of the weapon.

The issue I'm having is when the player is doing an Idle animation and fires the weapon immediately, the weapon bone could be at various heights because of the Idle animation. Setting the override position to true of course brings the gun up to the standard height it should be at, but it does it over a duration of time so my projectile fires long before the gun has been brought up to the correct height.

Is there a way to adjust the blend time for an override bone when I enable the position on the override so it instantly snaps to the correct position? (See gif for an example of the issue)

Pharan

I don't think it does that over a period of time. SkeletonUtility doesn't do transitions. At least not automatically. You have to slide the mix values yourself over time, so if you weren't doing that yourself already, it's not doing that at all.

The problem could just be a script execution order thing, and you are firing before the position is applied in that frame.

BTW. That's a cool smoke effect. Is that manually animated? Custom dynamic mesh you coded?

rxmarcus

Hmm yea I'm not doing any value mixing so you are probably right.
Does the position get applied in the Update pass?

As it currently stands when the player fires I do the following

playerCharacterController.WeaponBoneUtility.position = true;
skeletonAnimation.state.SetAnimation(0, "standardPositionSetup", false); // This is to get all the bones back to a natural state
// Fire rocket code here

Do I need to wait a frame before I fire my weapon?

PS - That rocket trail is from the Asset Store, I think it was called "Better Trails"

18 Dec 2016 11:19 pm

So I changed up my code so that it enables the position override, waits 1 frame, and then fires my weapon.

This DOES resolve the issue, but it feels very wrong that I'm waiting 1 frame before firing the players weapon with my game being a twitch shooter type game 🙁

Is there anything else that could be done?

Pharan

SkeletonUtility uses the animation apply callbacks on SkeletonAnimation. So it happens during SkeletonAnimation's Update which could be before or after your code.

a)
You can manually call

skeletonAnimation.Update(0)

right before the rocket code.
That should theoretically work. It may cause double-firing of events if you have any.

b)
Depending on your setup, you could also just say:

weaponBoneUtility.DoUpdate();
skeletonAnimation.skeleton.UpdateWorldTransform();
// ...then rocket code.

Though it may also not work if it has a bunch of child override bones. You could update those too, I guess.

rxmarcus

Thank you Pharan, the first suggestion seems to work out great for me! 🙂