Improving 3d cutscenes

[Volsung]

Cutscenes strenghten a mod atmosphere , that's why I worked on those talking head in Liberty bay^^
I don't know how you guys can script or edit cutscenes with dialogs in your mod.

But I wonder...

Even if freedom force, during those scene the characters just stand still.
Since the expressive talking heads grab the attention the character's are almost static
Could it be possible, during those cinematic briefings to use and play unique keyframes.

That would be so cool to add some real acting to those characters!
Simulate rage, vehemence ,excitment, amusement , sadness!
Emotions proper to sims-like game

So do you modders can force characters to play any segment of animations in a keyframe during a cutscene?

[tommyboy]

In all my keyframes I include "special_" animations made for cutscenes, and its easy to script these to play. The main problem is timing. Most of my gestures are only a few seconds long, so they tend to play before the speech is over (or sometimes even before its started).
The answer? A longer lasting set of gestures? Hard to stretch out pointing or shrugging, so that wont work. Play on a loop? Nope, nobody repeats the same gestures over and over and over. It's tough. If you knew a specific dialogue where a character expresses various emotions you could animate for it, but the keyframes would be good for that speach only.
I suppose someone a bit more skilled than I could come up with some longer "generic" emotion animations, say 10-20 seconds of the character looking agitated or angry or pacing back and forth, and these could be played throughout a dialogue, being called when necessary.

[Volsung]

Interesting^^
I should talk about that to "Ackbar"

[Previsionary]

as tommy hath said, scripters can use specific animations during a cutscene just by...scripting it. It's not particularly used much, because most meshes don't really have conversation animations, but it's available if people want to use them during a scene. The most I've used them was in the first mission of me spidey mod...and maybe the exiles mod...trying to time the animation with the dialog can be a little problematic at times though. :S

[Epimethee]

The Strangers used this quite a bit. (Anyone remembers the "to be continued" dances?)

As an aside, FFX (for both games) has a system to allow custom characters to react during a cutscene, based on voice-type personality (cf. the manual under "Custom character dialogue").

In theory, synching the animations with the conversations could be done, as Stumpy and M25 have code for that (in FFX 3.x, the AI knows the duration of an animation, AFAIK).