Animation Frames

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Animation Frames

Postby tlaero » Wed, 13Dec04 18:31

I'm working on improving Adventure Creator's ability to do animations. (You can currently do forward and loop. I'm adding reverse and pingpong.) So I've been thinking about Animations a lot lately. I've heard people say things like they're going to do 30 frame animations in their games, but I think that's a waste. As a developer, I think about the tradeoffs and such a thing seems off. I'm pretty sure the best animation Phreaky and I have ever done is 5 frames, with most being 3.

As a player, if you had the following choices in a sex scene, which would you prefer?
1 animation pose with 30 frames
3 different poses with 10 frames each
6 different poses with 5 frames each
10 different poses with 3 frames each

I think 6 is the sweet spot, but I'm curious what others think.

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Re: Animation Frames

Postby Super » Wed, 13Dec04 18:50

At the rate I move to the next scene, I kind of prefer still images to animations. Especially since animations tend to be repetitive. For instance, in a lot of games it's just watching the same animation over and over instead of new scenes. I find the sex in Christine much more erotic because a lot is happening. I dunno if that makes sense, but I tend to prefer stills because I don't like staring at a single thing too long. I guess if it was very long and isn't the same animation of a thrust over and over it might be different, but if prefer that time and energy to be soent on still graphics personally.
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Re: Animation Frames

Postby Wolfschadowe » Mon, 13Dec09 22:33

I think an occasional animation to these games adds a layer of immersion, when it's used right.

My thought is that an animated frame in this type of game is an enhancement to a still frame, not some attempt at an animated movie. Since the animated frame is enhancing a still image, looping it would be appropriate so long as there is an expectation of a repetitive movement there. Thrusting is an example, or rubbing, or anywhere that repetition would be natural. When I animate in my game's, (Ok, game so far :) ) my expectation is that a player will watch it for maybe two or three loops, or a few seconds. I doubt many would linger on an image for 10 seconds or even a minute. With that in mind, the number of frames needed would be associated with how much movement will be in the animation, and how smooth the animation will be.

I generally add an animation just before an erotic scene's climax (literally and figuratively) for hard mode players. There may be a few other places I'll throw in an animation if it enhances the story.

If I do a 5 frame animation that loops over a second, it's going to be very choppy. That same animation that loops over a quarter of a second will look smooth, but there can't be a lot of movement otherwise it will look like the motion is fast forwarded. In the posted section of BEW, the few animations present are running about 3-6 frames over a second or so, and they they are obviously stop-motion type images. In some of the later scenes that aren't available outside of playtesting yet, I have 30 frame animations doing more movement, and they look more smooth and natural (I hope).

In my experience, there are two aspects for creating an animation, Set-up and Render. Set-up does not necessarily increase with the number of frames, at least in Daz and Poser. Rendering does.

Let's say I want to animate a slow circular rub on a breast that takes one second to make the complete circle.

For set-up, let's say I want to make an animation with 4 motion points, The four motion points for a looping animation are Start/Stop at Top, Right, Down, Left. At each motion point I would pose the hand and the breast to match the motion, and maybe other things like clothes movement, hair position, expression, etc... all the same things I'd do if I wasn't making an animation, but once for each stop point. Let's say it takes me about 15 minutes for the first pose at the top, which is my start/stop point of the loop. It will then take about 10 minutes for each of the three remaining major stop points, so we're looking at about 45 minutes to set it up.

So set-up for a 4 frame animation of top, right, down, left movement of the hand and breast would take about 45 minutes to set-up and the four frames will just jump to each position, once every quarter second, and if I assume a 15 minute render for each frame, it will take an hour to render.

I could increase the frames to 8 keeping the same motion points, so now there is a transition frame between each position, and since each frame is displaying for .125 seconds instead of .25, it looks a little smoother. My set-up time hasn't changed since the software handles the transitions automatically, but my render time has increased to 2 hours. I can spend that time creating web-pages, programming logic, or eating dinner.

If I go to 16 frames, things get interesting. 16 frames a second looks smooth to most people, and my set-up time hasn't changed from 4 frames, although it does take 8 hours now to render the animation....but If I save the file, and then set it to render before I go to bed, who cares? When I get up in the morning it's done, and it looks nice. But now we have a square problem. The hand movement is choppy because it's moving in a square over 16 frames, although Daz will try to round out the movement a bit automatically, but now that I have some extra frames to work with, I can add a top right, bottom right, bottom left, and top left movement point to round out the motion. Most of the pose would already be done automatically by the software at the appropriate frames, so 5 minutes of tweaking for each of those positions will give me a nice round circular movement. Now I've added, at the most, 15 minutes of work over a 4 frame render, but it looks a lot smoother.

Usually, I think 30 frames is unnecessary over a 15 or 16 frame animation unless there is a lot of motion, or the animation is occurring over 2 seconds or so. Render time goes up on a per-frame basis, but actual effort really doesn't increase much with added frames, although I've played with them when I have the render time to spare. 30 frames takes about 16 hours. Start it before bed, and it's done when I come home from work the next day. Again, no problem, in my opinion.

I've probably used some 30 frame animations where I could have gotten away with 15 or even 10 in BEW, but mainly that's more me experimenting than actually needing to do it.

Circular animations are probably the most demanding. Something like a repetitive thrust I've done with 8-10 frames rendered, then I copied them, numbered them backwards to create an artificial ping-pong loop. (Thanks Tlaero for adding that natively to AC so I don't have to cheat!) I've set up a two motion point animation of a dancer swaying back and forth using a mirrored pose in as little as 5 minutes, but that's a lot of motion, so using 15 frames, and then copy/rename to get 30 frames is easy to do, or with the new AC, just set it to a ping-pong loop with only 15 images! Why 30 frames? I wanted it to be a slow sway over 2 seconds, and to look smooth and sensual, a minimum of 15 frames per second is needed. Sure, I could have just put the pose in the far swayed position on a single frame and used text to say (the dancer slowly sways back and forth) or I could say it and show it together for added effect, again just enhancing the still image, not trying to create a movie of the entire dance.

Above all of this though, there is the aspect of bandwidth and game size. BEW is going to be a bandwidth beast no matter what. Can't really have close to 2000 web pages for the first act alone, and be small. But it is a consideration to keep in mind. Too many animations with too many frames will bloat the game unnecessarily. I'm a little spoiled now as I have truly unlimited bandwith at 25mbs/25mbs speed, but I remember the days of modem, dsl, and monthly bandwidth caps, and remind myself to be gentle to those less fortunate than I am when it comes to Internet access. To those of you more fortunate than I....I hate you all. :)

My recommendation, use the fewest frames necessary to get the effect you are looking for, but don't be afraid to go to 30 frames if necessary, and always have your goal in mind. Don't make a movie, just enhance the still frame, and don't over-use animations in your game. BEW will be 2000 web pages for Act 1, but less than 20 of those pages will be animated. That's less than 1% animated pages.

Of course, this is just my opinion, and I reserve the right to change my mind based on later discussions. :)

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Re: Animation Frames

Postby tlaero » Tue, 13Dec10 20:01

Thanks Wolf. I've been playing with 10 frame animations and they certainly look good. I guess I'm on the fence between 5 and 10 frames now.

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Re: Animation Frames

Postby iksanabot » Sun, 13Dec15 16:32

Leo's game Olga: 20 dollar girl used 10 frame animations, and that's why he was able to have the player control the animation speed by move movements whereby the character movement matched the mouse movement exactly. I really wanted this fro LwT, but the game was already large and so they made the animations 5 images, and that prevented us from using the same interactive mechanism because it looked too choppy at only 5 frames. My personal feeling is that 5 frames would work fine if you made sure the movement between each frame was very small. I.e., if you took just five consecutive frames from Olga, it would still look smooth, it would just be a smaller range of motion. I guess my preference/priority for making use of ten frames would be to use it to show two positions, each animation of 5 frames, but with small range of motion so they look smooth. But that could also depend on the position/plot point/story device, so that sometimes a 10 frame animation of one movement/position would be worth the losing a second 5 frame animation of some other movement/position.
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Re: Animation Frames

Postby Arizona » Tue, 13Dec31 10:45

Personally, I prefer the animations with three or five frames. Many times, the movements in the animations / videos at 30fps are unnatural and the result is much worse than a few static images.
Sorry for my poor English.
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