[solved]Problem with a custom eating animation (weirdly floating body parts in the middle of the long eat animation)

[NPCMaxwell]

So I got a very helpful tutorial how to replace animations. So far it worked perfectly on funnyidle ("hungry"). Next I tried the same approach with the long eat animation playing when characters eat meat for example. It did work..........but not as intended. The reason why I have to replace it, is because my character's cheeks have the completely wrong position (character has different proportions. I managed to fix almost everything by editing the pngs to camouflage clipping so I only want to adjust some animations that cause facial disortion e.g. hungry and the chewing eating animations.) The cheeks and facial positions were correct now, so were the arms, but only until the chewing part of the animation was over. Then the floating cheeks and lowerarm+hands ruined it.

Now I thought it was my fault so I've been almost spending a half day and night to change everything I could think of. Then I thought, ok maybe my player_actions_eat template was wrong, so I decompiled the original player_actions_eat.zip using K tools, made NO change to the spriter file at all, besides renaming the eat animation inside the spriter file into customanim, (made two versions, one were I deleted all other animations so only customanim was left, the other one with all eating animations) then recompiled the new animation inside the exported folder of the custom animation player template mod. I deleted the tex and build inside the new zip file. And then when I tested the animation in game the EXACT same problem happened.

It also doesn't seem to make a difference which character's tex and build I use with the anim or which character I choose for testing, I have also renamed the symbols of the left side of the arms into ARM_normal(threedigits) and ARM_carry(threedigits), it will still always be the weirdest douplicated cheeks and lower-arms floating in circles over the character's body as soon as he does the *whipes mouth after chewing* part the floating body parts stay until the animation ends then vanish into thin air.

Can maybe someone try decompiling the player_actions_eat.zip and try themselves if they also get floating body parts when they rename ("eat") and recompile it and play the animation? I am so confused, as I remember having additional limps before, but they were caused by the symbols not being named ARM_normal/ARM_carry, with giving the symbols the appropiate names had been solving the issue.

It's just a small detail, but it kind of crushes the hopes I got when seeing how well funnyidle-hungry worked on making my taller character's face look decent.

Edited June 15, 2024 by NPCMaxwell
...fixed...

[Feything]

Ktools decompiles things not so exact. So you'll want to probably decompile it using dsanimtool or some other decompilier/updated offset of ktools instead to get accurate pivots. The pivot points are slightly off on ktools and it has a tendency to distort or destroy image resolution. If you pair the awkward decompiling of ktools with an animation that has tons of swapping images, the default autocompilier absolutely hates that and will wreck your animation when you put it in game. It's fine for making lesser complicated animations without too much image flipping through, especially if it's fully custom from the ground up.

Here's an example video (It's very meme-y though) of a whole custom drinking animation I made using a hybrid of custom and decompiled animations with dsanimtool both decompiled and recompiled. 

You can find find dsanimtool and stuffs in this forum post 

 

[NPCMaxwell]

1 hour ago, Feything said:

Ktools decompiles things not so exact. So you'll want to probably decompile it using dsanimtool or some other decompilier/updated offset of ktools instead to get accurate pivots. The pivot points are slightly off on ktools and it has a tendency to distort or destroy image resolution. If you pair the awkward decompiling of ktools with an animation that has tons of swapping images, the default autocompilier absolutely hates that and will wreck your animation when you put it in game. It's fine for making lesser complicated animations without too much image flipping through, especially if it's fully custom from the ground up.

Here's an example video (It's very meme-y though) of a whole custom drinking animation I made using a hybrid of custom and decompiled animations with dsanimtool both decompiled and recompiled. 

You can find find dsanimtool and stuffs in this forum post 

 

I forgot to mention that the k-tools I used to decompile the in-game animation was actually the one that comes with dsanimtools as it was the only one I could find that I was able to download. (rip) I have just downloaded it /again/ and tried to recompile my tall_eat.scml file with dsanimtools (before I recompiled using the autocompiler in Klei's mod tools folder. I was NOT aware k-tools could be used as a compiler too [I'm the official king of dummies, I know]) and to make sure tested it via custom animation player with waxwell. So HE now DOES the appropiate animation my character is supposed to do without any floating [yay! \o/]   And then I tested it with the tall guy, and finally he looks like a normal human when eating his dishes, thanks! So it turns out the dreadful autocompiler was the source of another sleepless night. Another step closer to my goal it seems, thank you.

[Rickzzs]

Making official animations usually starts with an animation template. Official animation files are interpolated so you need to key each frame, which is a huge work. In your case, you can start from the player_actions_eat.scml decompiled using dsanimtool (see DSTModutils/pyscripts/) where krane and autocompiler are not suitable, and then edit each key frame in Spriter. When you are done, convert the animation back to anim.bin using dsanimtool. And then convert anim.bin to anim.json, and build.bin&atlas to build.json&images, load all of them in the web animation player to see if you are correct. The data of scml is supposed to lose 1/4 information when it is converted from raw matrix, but is not too noticeable. You can compare them in Spriter and animation player.

Edited June 10, 2024 by Rickzzs

[NPCMaxwell]

2 minutes ago, Rickzzs said:

Making official animations usually starts with an animation template. Official animation files are interpolated so you need to key each frame, which is a huge work. In your case, you can start from the player_actions_eat.scml decompiled using dsanimtool (see DSTModutils/pyscripts/) where krane and autocompiler are not suitable, and then edit each key frame in Spriter. When you are done, convert the animation back to anim.bin using dsanimtool. And then convert anim.bin to anim.json, and build.bin&atlas to build.json&images, load all of them in the web animation player to see if you are correct. The data of scml is supposed to lose 1/4 information when it is converted from raw matrix, but is not too noticeable. You can compare them in Spriter and animation player.

ok this sounds a little too detailed for me to handle (I'm literally a baby when it comes to those things. I am happy when my character looks at least more or less humanoid and not like a complete alien when it comes to his animations.) I have a bunch of templates for the animations I plan to change ready so I have been using those as help for hungry and eat so far without actually an issue (aside from autocompiler creating floaties, but this one seems fixed now), since the only symbols I focus on adjusting are the face [+ cheeks for eating] by now. But maybe if I progress with this project further, I will see if I can maybe make use of your method.

[Feything]

To put it in simple words to what Rickzzs is saying. When you decompile official stuff, it comes keyed already. Which can be a lot of keys to the point it's ridiculous to handle,and it is a pain in the butt to animate and edit individually especially because people have the habit of just deleting things entirely instead of leaving the keys in the scrubber. Also when you make animations from scratch with animtool in mind you have to key each frame one by one each 33 frames including putting in dummy frames and sometimes that can get nuts.

There's actually a trick I do when it comes to keying with the dst animtools instead of manually keying it like in the video. What I do is steal keyframes like this if you plan on trying to compile stuff with animtool. Because if you don't key things in increments of 33 then your animations will move like they ingested 10 tons of caffeinated beverages and food items unless you intend for the animation to run at 100 miles per hour in fastforward then leave the inbetween frames empty.

What I do to save time is this because I animate soooo much. I have a massive mod so I must use animtool almost religiously and needed to find new shortcuts to deal with this situation at a faster pace lmao. 

So this is the first screenshot image right. It looks all scary because it has all those keys at 33 frames.

This is me cloning the animation and deleting all keyframe in timeline (not the scrubber) except the first keys because if you delete the first keys you remove the entire symbol from the scene. This is also how I remove stuff from the timeline in a cleaner way. But you see it leaves all of the frames pre-keyed in the scrubber. You also see the keyframes survived in the scrubber.

What's nice about this too is you don't ever have to move to a frame manually ever again. You just press 1 or 2 to jump to the frame and done. You can quickly key, no guess work or anything, just hit key all button and 1 and 2 when applying dummy animations.

You can tween or do interpolate like this too.

Great thing about doing it this way is that you won't mess up and it becomes foolproof and clean. xD You can do this method with official decompiled stuff too, just as long as you go into the timeline itself and delete the unnecessary keys inside the timeline, not in the scrubber. You don't need to clone if you're editing existing aimations too, just reuse the keys in the scrubber. 

You then convert when done and your animation should be fine ingame.

Hope this helps!

Edited June 10, 2024 by Feything

[NPCMaxwell]

2 hours ago, Feything said:

To put it in simple words to what Rickzzs is saying. When you decompile official stuff, it comes keyed already. Which can be a lot of keys to the point it's ridiculous to handle,and it is a pain in the butt to animate and edit individually especially because people have the habit of just deleting things entirely instead of leaving the keys in the scrubber. Also when you make animations from scratch with animtool in mind you have to key each frame one by one each 33 frames including putting in dummy frames and sometimes that can get nuts.

There's actually a trick I do when it comes to keying with the dst animtools instead of manually keying it like in the video. What I do is steal keyframes like this if you plan on trying to compile stuff with animtool. Because if you don't key things in increments of 33 then your animations will move like they ingested 10 tons of caffeinated beverages and food items unless you intend for the animation to run at 100 miles per hour in fastforward then leave the inbetween frames empty.

What I do to save time is this because I animate soooo much. I have a massive mod so I must use animtool almost religiously and needed to find new shortcuts to deal with this situation at a faster pace lmao. 

So this is the first screenshot image right. It looks all scary because it has all those keys at 33 frames.

This is me cloning the animation and deleting all keyframe in timeline (not the scrubber) except the first keys because if you delete the first keys you remove the entire symbol from the scene. This is also how I remove stuff from the timeline in a cleaner way. But you see it leaves all of the frames pre-keyed in the scrubber. You also see the keyframes survived in the scrubber.

What's nice about this too is you don't ever have to move to a frame manually ever again. You just press 1 or 2 to jump to the frame and done. You can quickly key, no guess work or anything, just hit key all button and 1 and 2 when applying dummy animations.

You can tween or do interpolate like this too.

 

Great thing about doing it this way is that you won't mess up and it becomes foolproof and clean. xD You can do this method with official decompiled stuff too, just as long as you go into the timeline itself and delete the unnecessary keys inside the timeline, not in the scrubber. You don't need to clone if you're editing existing aimations too, just reuse the keys in the scrubber. 

You then convert when done and your animation should be fine ingame.

Hope this helps!

I have never heard the word "scrubber" so I don't know what it is. (Edit: I figured it's the top line. While the timeline is the one split by symbols so yes, that should have been obvious but my brain is sleep deprived. So far I have mostly only clicked this "scrubber" then too, but good to learn what I was actually doing while trying around with the tool surface) Also until today I have only used the ancient version of spriter, but thanks to you linking to the github I have updated it to this one, which looks way easier to maintain. Also the advice with 1 and 2 keys is the best, but I have already figured that out by accident during my first edit (which saved me a lot of nerves x3), thanks for writing it down here again, nevertheless, since probably not everyone accidently stumbles upon this function. About the timeline, yes it seems incredibly cluttered, so I am glad that apparently the symbols will still exist when only keeping the top line, I will try this on my next project then, although the cluttering hasn't bothered me too much so far, but it's probably still easier for the eyes this way. I hope the worst problems will be fixed with all those advices then.

 

JUST the most important question: You mentioned the animations being incredibly fast, and yes, I think I have noticed this, too that my edited long eating animation seems to appear running a little uncomfortably fast. I just didn't quite understand how to make the animation seem a little less rushed. I have tried to figure out from your text above, but I fear my mind is still too new to this (and the terms) to decipher it. So far I just thought the animation probably "has" to be that fast paced seeming and that it is "normal". (or that it's just my insomnia eyes that struggle from enlongate exposure from screen light)

FINAL EDIT: I just for the first time noticed the "play speed" part. I suppose I can change this one to make the animations look more comfortable for my eyes in the final animation then. Or would it be a problem for the game if the replacement animation is slightly of a slower speed?

Edited June 10, 2024 by NPCMaxwell

[Feything]

Play speed doesn't effect the game. You can ignore it.It's just strictly a spriter thing. You stop it from being fast moving by putting in dummy keys, so even if you didn't animate in certain parts, you put a keyframe in every 33 frames by pressing key all button and your animation will be back to normal speed.

So if you look at the example above (the first example that looks intimidating) you'll see I keyed every 33 frames. That prevents your animation from moving at the speed of sound. And is the reason you'll want those to *steal* keyframes.

[NPCMaxwell]

14 hours ago, Feything said:

Play speed doesn't effect the game. You can ignore it.It's just strictly a spriter thing. You stop it from being fast moving by putting in dummy keys, so even if you didn't animate in certain parts, you put a keyframe in every 33 frames by pressing key all button and your animation will be back to normal speed.

So if you look at the example above (the first example that looks intimidating) you'll see I keyed every 33 frames. That prevents your animation from moving at the speed of sound. And is the reason you'll want those to *steal* keyframes.

ok now I understood. Since I only edit already existing animations they should all have the 33 frames steps then, already, but technically this should mean, if I add in more dummy frames for example, the animation will become slower in game. So if I want my long-eat animation to be slightly slower, maybe, I must add one or two or three dummies into it.

[NPCMaxwell]

22 hours ago, Feything said:

Play speed doesn't effect the game. You can ignore it.It's just strictly a spriter thing. You stop it from being fast moving by putting in dummy keys, so even if you didn't animate in certain parts, you put a keyframe in every 33 frames by pressing key all button and your animation will be back to normal speed.

So if you look at the example above (the first example that looks intimidating) you'll see I keyed every 33 frames. That prevents your animation from moving at the speed of sound. And is the reason you'll want those to *steal* keyframes.

I must have misunderstood something I tried to "clean up" the timeline by removing all besides the keypoints necessary to keep the symbol inside the animation, and you're right the animation is indeed slower now, but funny enough it makes no sense now anymore since now the movements look completely off. But it's ok I guess that was some misconception of mine. Instead of deleting /all/ keypoints I probably just have to reduce the /unnessary/ keypoints that make the animation rushed and only keep the ones that are necessary to make sure the limps are in the right position? I suppose I will just toy around with the long eating animation some more until I make it neither looked rush nor anything else. I didn't meant to annoy you, by writing this, but I thought it was just funny that I still literally don't know what I am doing with spriter at ALL.

22 hours ago, Feything said:

Play speed doesn't effect the game. You can ignore it.It's just strictly a spriter thing. You stop it from being fast moving by putting in dummy keys, so even if you didn't animate in certain parts, you put a keyframe in every 33 frames by pressing key all button and your animation will be back to normal speed.

So if you look at the example above (the first example that looks intimidating) you'll see I keyed every 33 frames. That prevents your animation from moving at the speed of sound. And is the reason you'll want those to *steal* keyframes.

OK before I am doing something weird: I think eat looks more of less ok in spriter when I make the timeline look like this:  (haven't tested it in game yet though)

I just want to make sure I understood what I was supposed to do to adjust the animation speed, before I choose the next animation to edit x)

EDIT: I just tried it ingame. TURNS OUT THAT WAS A CATASTROPHIC CHOICE! With the timeline down there v the animation looks completely broken in game (like a stop motion, but a very weird one). So I suppose I rather work with a cluttered timeline for now and edit every single keypoint instead until I really understood how your method is intended to work. ^^ Sorry that I am such a dummy, but I rather edit my animations first, and then, if I decide to adjust some more, I can try again to see if I can do it your way to make the animations slower. Until then my character will have to be on liters of caffeine I fear.

Edited June 11, 2024 by NPCMaxwell
OH NO D:

[NPCMaxwell]

On 6/10/2024 at 6:18 PM, Feything said:

To put it in simple words to what Rickzzs is saying. When you decompile official stuff, it comes keyed already. Which can be a lot of keys to the point it's ridiculous to handle,and it is a pain in the butt to animate and edit individually especially because people have the habit of just deleting things entirely instead of leaving the keys in the scrubber. Also when you make animations from scratch with animtool in mind you have to key each frame one by one each 33 frames including putting in dummy frames and sometimes that can get nuts.

There's actually a trick I do when it comes to keying with the dst animtools instead of manually keying it like in the video. What I do is steal keyframes like this if you plan on trying to compile stuff with animtool. Because if you don't key things in increments of 33 then your animations will move like they ingested 10 tons of caffeinated beverages and food items unless you intend for the animation to run at 100 miles per hour in fastforward then leave the inbetween frames empty.

What I do to save time is this because I animate soooo much. I have a massive mod so I must use animtool almost religiously and needed to find new shortcuts to deal with this situation at a faster pace lmao. 

So this is the first screenshot image right. It looks all scary because it has all those keys at 33 frames.

This is me cloning the animation and deleting all keyframe in timeline (not the scrubber) except the first keys because if you delete the first keys you remove the entire symbol from the scene. This is also how I remove stuff from the timeline in a cleaner way. But you see it leaves all of the frames pre-keyed in the scrubber. You also see the keyframes survived in the scrubber.

What's nice about this too is you don't ever have to move to a frame manually ever again. You just press 1 or 2 to jump to the frame and done. You can quickly key, no guess work or anything, just hit key all button and 1 and 2 when applying dummy animations.

You can tween or do interpolate like this too.

 

Great thing about doing it this way is that you won't mess up and it becomes foolproof and clean. xD You can do this method with official decompiled stuff too, just as long as you go into the timeline itself and delete the unnecessary keys inside the timeline, not in the scrubber. You don't need to clone if you're editing existing aimations too, just reuse the keys in the scrubber. 

You then convert when done and your animation should be fine ingame.

Hope this helps!

I tried this one now, for the cheeks and face adjustment, but I fear I am somehow unable to get rid of the "bad stopmotion" feeling of the animation, so I must go back to the "caffeine" version to make it at least look more or less normal. I still don't quite understand how this is supposed to function after all. Still thanks for the suggestion, maybe I will one day by accident stumple upon a way to make it work like yours.

Edited June 12, 2024 by NPCMaxwell

[Feything]

Cheeks-0 and Cheeks-1 is unkeyed in a lot of the timeline, same with face. It has to be keyed completely, just like torso, skirt, swap_hat etc. You can't leave gaps in it or it's going to appear stop motion-y. Make sure they're tweening too, because if it's not keying in those spots with the gaps then it means that symbol is not in the scene.

[NPCMaxwell]

9 minutes ago, Feything said:

Cheeks-0 and Cheeks-1 is unkeyed in a lot of the timeline, same with face. It has to be keyed completely, just like torso, skirt, swap_hat etc. You can't leave gaps in it or it's going to appear stop motion-y. Make sure they're tweening too, because if it's not keying in those spots with the gaps then it means that symbol is not in the scene.

I had it all keyed before (and the animation looked ok just a little speedy). I thought if I made the timeline empty it was the same as what was shown on your attached screenshot. It seems I completely misunderstood what you meant with the "clean" timeline. I thought it meant I had to delete "unessessary" keyframes. Also I wasn't able to figure out what the term "tweening" means. I better put this aside for now and just leave the timeline as it was, only moving the symbols around like I used to do before.

[Rickzzs]

But it is easy to adjust speed. Just change the time of the frames(there is a function to lengthen time). You only need to interpolate frames if you start from an empty timeline. If you decompile official anim, it is already interpolated. autocompiler.exe will interpolate anim to 40 fps, which may cause visual error if some images are not there. dsanimtool.exe won't interpolate anim.

Edited June 12, 2024 by Rickzzs

[NPCMaxwell]

1 hour ago, Rickzzs said:

But it is easy to adjust speed. Just change the time of the frames(there is a function to lengthen time). You only need to interpolate frames if you start from an empty timeline. If you decompile official anim, it is already interpolated. autocompiler.exe will interpolate anim to 40 fps, which may cause visual error if some images are not there. dsanimtool.exe won't interpolate anim.

Ah I think now I got it, so the whole key-thing from the above pictures with an empty timeline only applies if I want to BUILD-ADDITIONALLY frames ONTO an already existing animation or want to create one from scratch. Sorry for my confusion earlier.

[NPCMaxwell]

OK it turns out I made a MORTAL mistake: Instead of checking the animation with my character mod, I had "only" been testing it with with the custom animation player. It turns out now that when testing ANY animation file (no matter if compiled by autocompiler or by dsanimtools), my server now won't start at all (stuck in server is generating world for an eternity), anymore, when loading the animation into my character mod's modmain + replacing the funnyidle for hungry with "tall_hungry". My server ALSO doesn't start when trying it with an extremly barebone version of my character mod (basically only esc with renamed files, and the animation loaded + replacing funnyidle with "tall_hungry" or even without any animation loaded and just replacing hungry with e.g. "quick_eat") it is stuck on "creating server" for ages. As soon as I take the funnyidle replacement out of the modmain it loads normally, but obviously I can't use my animations then.

The problem started after I switched from the old spriter version found in the standard mod-tools (where there is autocompiler) to the new spriter version. Though I am not sure if this is actually the cause since my mod behaves the same

I will now take drastik measurements, for a test, means I will reinstall the whole game with only my character mod and then try rebuild my entire mod from scratch again tomorrow. I suppose....

If this is still causing me trouble afterwards. I will upload my mod here, maybe someone else can see something that got broken.

 

Final thoughts (edit): All in all, even if this is broken beyond repair, at least I have been able to learn some basics by attempting this project and I had quite some fun while it worked.

Just to make sure I am doing everything "better" this time. Would this list here be the right approach this time to minimize the risk of eternal-world-creation when the character is almost done but only the animations want to be adjusted?

a) editing basic esc-template files according to the tutorial [x]

b) exchanging exported png folders with my character's art [x]

c) adjusting idle-hungry animation in new spriter version + replacing the SG animation for funnyidle hungry in modmain (using dsanimtools instead of autocompiler) [x]

d) if successful -> adjusting the other facial-dismorphing animation and replacing them with custom versions [ ]

e) IF IT STILL WORKS readding my character's abilities bit by bit, first maxwell abilities, then custom abilities. [ ]

 

EDIT: Nevermind, it seems the mistake was my chronic insomniac brain mostly. The game is loading again after I fixed a typo that somehow sneaked into my mod after my last adjustment.

Edited June 15, 2024 by NPCMaxwell
The curse of not getting any sleep + one(1) typo inside my updated code.