An Animation Clip is a specialized Simulation Event used for loading new animation into Atoms Crowd. The animation clip will get its motion data from an fbx or atomsclip file.
Users can tweak their clips by editing the following values:
- Event Name, the name of the animation clip
- Clip path, the path to the clip file
- Blend Frames After foot up, the number of frames used for blending after the foot lock on the ground is done
- Loop, if the clip is a loopable clip
- Start and End frames of your clips
- Loop Blend, the number of frames used to blend when looping
- Idle, if the clip is a idle clip or not. If Idle is on the foot lock system will be disabled when playing this clip.
- Direction type: static, pelvis or joints. When set to static the clip will use as direction to the vector specified in the Direction field. When set to pelvis, the clip will use the pelvis velocity as direction. When set to joints, the direction of the clip will be the vector travelling from the first joint to the second joint (the joint ids are selected with the Direction Joints field).
- Direction, the direction used when the direction type is set to static.
- Direction Joints, the two joints ids used for defining the direction vector when the direction type is set to joints. The button on the right will show a pop up dialog to help you find the right joints id for a given agent type.
- Transitions Frames, for long clips you might have different transition frames.
You can either enter them manually with a comma separated string (i.e. "10 , 50, 100") or let Atoms guess them for you by pressing the Auto button. Once pressed the field will be populated, but you will still be able to edit the string. If you don't specify transition frames only the last loop end frame of the clip will be used.
Transition Frames are used by state machines only.
The clip direction
You might wonder why you need to set a direction for your clips. This is actually quite important, in fact if you set a wrong static direction for a clip you might end up having your agents going in the wrong direction.
Also it's important to understand that clips for a character should all share the same direction when used in a state machine, except few particular cases.
Your clip direction tells Atoms how your clip moves in space.
Atoms uses the clip direction to rotate your agent and match the actual agent direction (travelling direction) which is computed at each frame. For instance, if your clip is travelling mainly on the Z axis and you set the direction to be the X axis, you will see your agents rotated of 90 degrees on the Y axis later and they will move in the wrong direction.
Please check the Animation Clip chapter to understand better how to set up your agent direction.