Root Bone Animation Issue

[Elf_Lord]

Hey, all! I'm a novice modeler in need of some advice or a fix here with an animation issue. I needed to give the Eredar model an actual fall-over death animation, so I made one in Mdlvis. A little over-the-top, I admit, but that's what I needed for this design. The problem is that the Eredar returns to his default stand position at the end of the animation, but if I copy one of the frames that would keep him on the ground to the end of the animation, he starts sinking into the ground then floats up out of it before resetting to his final position. It has to do with how I've manipulated his root bone, I think, but I don't know how to fix it. I've tried to compensate for it manually but the sinking/floating just moves elsewhere in the animation. I've attached the version that reverts to standing in hopes that someone could point out to me how to keep it from doing so. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks for your time!

 

[Cuore]

Hey elf lord I recently saw the beginning of the youtube playthrough of Chasing the Dawn. It's one of the best things I've seen done in Warcraft 3: thank you for making it! I'll have a look to the model and see if I can help you in any way.

 

[Elf_Lord]

Thank you very much!

 

[Cuore]

If the goal is simply to prevent the sink/raise movements, the solution is simple: you open the model in mdlvis and go to the animation mode, selecting the death animation and then viewing the tab "movement". You then choose bone_root from the list of available bones and select the "move tool" (hotkey: Q). on the right menu column search for the section called "controller". Your model has the modality "hermite" selected, that's the cause of the oscillations. Choose linear and the problem will disappear.

Spoiler: a little more on controllers

a controller is defined for every bone that gets animated in at least a frame in that animation. Static bones have no controller.
For every bone there are 3 separate controllers for: translations, rotations, scaling. If you only rotate that particular bone during your sequence, only the rotation controller will be created and there will be no controllers for rotation nor scaling. About the differences in animations generated by the various types of controllers allowed for .mdx, i can tell that linear is the simplest and straightforward, and the others add movements in between the frames to smoothen transitions better, but I'm not knowledgeable on the differences among the others.

If you want though, I could have a look and see if i find some death animation from other models to transfer onto the eredar lock. I think it would improve the look of the sequence. Just let me know.

Here is the modified model:

 

[Elf_Lord]

Okay, I understand. That makes a lot of sense.

The reason I went with such an odd death animation was because I need it to match a particular sound file. The guy literally chokes to death on blood while laughing. It's supposed to be... disturbing, to say the least, and the sound file lasts 6-7 seconds. If you can think of something that might meet those criteria, I would love to see it, but I couldn't think of anything myself.

 

[Cuore]

I'll see what i can do I'll get in touch