At present, there is no way to disable unit head movement during animations. Dev animator, Smookie, comments on this here: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?177500-Animation-explanation-of-the-magic-behind/page5. Be wonderful if we could get something like _x disableHead Boolean.
This would allow for greater immersion (unit looks at player during cutscenes) and would help prevent several animation anomalies.
Thanks chaps!
Test several animations and notice that the head movement is not controlled.
You can really get a sense of this by playing a briefing animation on two units, and them attaching them with the attachTo command so that they both occupy the same space. You'll notice that the two heads will move randomly, whereas the rest of the body stays in place.
A feature to disable head animations would be great. Especially if Bohemia Interactive decides to support the virtual reality head mounted displays. Nothing would be more anoying than a shaking head and a hand, that wipes your virtual sweat from your forehead.
Arma 3 already has head tracking in the form of TrackIR. This would also currently be an issue for those users too. Headtracking would be handled the exact same. If it is not giving TrackIR users issues, then it won't affect VR goggle users either.
You can really see the difference by setting damage to 1 on an AI character and then playing a cutscene animation. No head movement - it's brilliant! Trouble is, you're stuck with a dead unit :P
Hell yeah! So many of the animations involve AI moving their head all over the place. Please BIS, don't forget about this one :D
I know, that and how TrackIR is working. From my own experience, there is a big difference, if you just look on your monitor from distance (with TrackIR) or you have the feeling, to be in the game (with a HMD). Every shaking or swiping hands infront of your view would be distracting or can cause nauseated feelings.
I should point out that this ticket is more about disabling head movement for animations. You know, when you play an animation on an AI, and their head is swinging left, right, up, down - looking all over the place but at the player the AI unit is meant to be looking at / talking to.
That said, the hand wiping can be a little distracting. Might be worth setting up a second thread for idle anims?
Cheers :)
Very excited about this. Will it be a command for the config. Something like allowHeadMovement = 0?
would this be a command for the config or an ingame command, like, _unit disableAI "headMovement", I wonder?