IK manipulation within source

Draffin

Just out of curiosity. Has anyone here used IK animation in the source engine? I'm starting a mod which is going to rely heavily on object interaction within the engine and was wondering how people have fared with it before?

Farfarer

Using animation matrixes seemed to be our best bet when we were playing with that. Having a wide range of movements left/right/up/down and blending between those to get limbs ending up where we wanted them. Although our programmers weren't really that animation savvy so it was what we had to go with, rather than code in something more dynamic.

What kind of stuff are you looking to achieve?

Draffin

The mod is going to be a mixture of physics based puzzles similar to the currently half life 2 genre. And incorporating the Lucas Arts puzzle adventure game style (monkey island, sam and max, full throttle etc). An inventory system will be set up and players will pick up and use items in the game world.

Unique animations will be pre-rendered in Maya or XSI softimage and they will play when the player uses the right equipment the right way. However the player will be required to "Grab" and use certain objects set in the game world which means we'll need to use IK chains so we can move the hand to the object, play a hand grasping animation and then join a bone in the object to the player so the animation can then play and the object moves appropriately. It would also be used in the sense that a player may need to lean against a door to open it or kick a certain object.

A situation that we're planning is the player is locked in a cage. To unlock the door, the player picks up a nearby rat (putting it in the inventory). And then "uses" it with the cage. In the animation the player forces the rat into the key hole and twists the rat around using it as a key (with the appropriate squelching sound effects and blood splatter). So the player will need an IK chain to pick up the rat from their current position (moving the player to the rat, playing a crouch animation, and then moving the hand to the rats skeleton and playing the hand grab animation).

The game will play in 1st person except when a pre-rendered animation is used. In which it switches to 3rd person to provide the player with the animation as a reward for completing the puzzle. These animations are going to play a big part of the mod so we have to make sure it looks clean.

And i'm hoping we haven't bitten off more than we can chew