3rd person diagonal movement and animation

[Rick]

I don't have any 3rd person games in my steam library atm, but what are some of the ways you guys have seen diagonal movement and animations in 3rd person done and which do you like? Currently I just keep playing the run forward animation but it creates a sliding effect that looks bad. I'm looking at turning the hips some in the direction (having issues with that though) but with the camera staying directly behind I get the sense that it might still look strange.

 

Any ideas, thoughts around this?

[cassius]

I don't bother with this My character just walks forward when I hit w key and backward when I press s key. Her shadow moves when I rotate her left or right and this seems( to me) to hide any odd look about it.

A friend who tried my game said "don't we ever get to see her face" Well making her turn and walk toward the camera is easy enough but then she bumps into objects unless I give camera a steep angle.

[Rick]

I should have specified it's like gears or war type of camera. You don't ever see the players face. When you rotate with the mouse the entire character rotates. When you shoot or aim it zooms in over the shoulder. Everything is looking decent it's just I don't know how to best handle diagonal movement. If I could get the bone rotation working I could at least try turning the hips 45 degrees and see how that looks, but I just feel like diagonal movement is awkward looking.

 

In Lara Croft her body goes diagonally and then pushes the camera to be at her back again, but it doesn't feel right to me. I can't test it in a large open area to see how it looks when you do it for an extended period of time, which could/would be the case in a shooter, because there really are none in that game.

[Tim Shea]

A lot of AAA games will use an animation engine that blends together a strafe animation and a run animation depending on the angle. This requires really good assets though. From the videos I could find, I think this is what Gears does, though it also doesn't let you see the character's lower legs, which might minimize the slidiness. Gears does an excellent job of giving the character movement a heavy feel, so that would reduce the slidiness too.

 

Games with really "tight" controls, like competitive shooters, might instead use the turret-style torso, but honestly that looks horrific to me.

 

Games that aren't shooters (and don't need a reticle) can just rotate the character entirely in the direction they are moving.