Playing animations...

I was recently testing some custom animations ingame, and run across a few problems:

- Some animations were not recognized by the engine, like "cry" "sit" "sleep". I tried to trigger them in GUI, but no luck so far. Is it possible to trigger them in Jass or am I forced to rename them?

- Some tft models have "Walk" and "Stand Hit", but I've never seen them used so far. Any way to make them show without triggers?

- Is it possible to play an animation backward, stop it at any point, and/or change its speed?

Walk animations are obviously used when the unit walks (if there is a "walk fast" animation too, then the current movement speed of the unit determines which one is used).
I'm not sure about the stand hit ones, but they sure look great in cinamatics.

You can change animation speed using the animation - animation speed action. Or whatever it's called. If you set the speed to 0, you'll have the animation stopped.
I don't think there is a way to play them backwards though.

kind of wish it though, wouldn't it be cool to see a hero's corpse drop from teh sky?

Stand Hit animations are played when the unit is attacked. Look at the furlborg model, or the shadow hunter. I think only certain stand hit animations are played though.

set animation speed to something negative (-100%)

yeah but does it really work? if yes, then COOL!

It does, Tim. did it in a spell of his.

... I abandonned a lot of ideas thinking this couldn,t be done...

COOL! That creates lots of new possiblities. Thanks, I guess.

It only works if you play the animation first, and pause it before it completes. Otherwise the model will just freeze. (In Tim.'s spell, he played the death animation and paused it shortly before it ended, then used negative animation speed to reverse the death animation)

The game can't handle any non-standard sequence names, far as I know.

You'll need that PlayAnimByIndex or whatever JASS thingy.

Yes, the SetUnitAnimationByIndex allows this, and is also the only way to play specific unit animations (like stand-3), so any serious cinematic maker should be familiar with it.

like set the animation speed to very fast or something like 10000%, then pause it (using timers or something for the wait) and then set the animation speed backwards.

That could possibly work. I don't know if there is a limit on animation speed or anything. Would required some testing.

Allright, thanks for the informations. :)