Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

Domarius

Member
  • Posts

    7519
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Domarius

  1. It's not a way of ignoring the graph editor - it's another tool altogther that makes huge sweeping changes very very simple. I guess you have to really try it out to appreciate what I mean by my examples. I don't think oDDity ever did - just got some (outdated) 2nd hand opinions and never actually used it himself.

     

    An akward analogy I just came up with, is basically using one thing to do many things can be more complicated. Sticking with one timeline for everything could be compared to trying to design a helecopter with a rotor that moves it in all directions at once. Layers can be compared to adding a rotor on the tail, which is another layer of movement. Now one can move the helecopter independantly of the other, and get a more complex result with a simpler interaction.

  2. Cool - can you show me examples though? I've found the actual structure of the skeleton to be fine for animating in the past.

     

    We can now weigh up the twistedness vs the work getting a new skeleton in the game, cause at the moment I could happily resurrect the old skeleton and just fix the positions and weighting.

     

    I'm going to be on standby on this forum for the rest of the day, just doing other stuff, untill we sort this out. Maybe you'd like to chat on MSN to speed things up?

     

    domarius@hotmail.com

  3. Bah :) what's the big deal about cracks. As soon as I buy a game, I download the latest patch, and then the latest no-cd crack for that version. The entire game fits on my hard drive, why should I have to shuffle DVDs around? Plus a scratch on a movie DVD is just a glitch on one frame. A scratch on a game DVD and it's 100% fucked, every time.

     

    Games I bought and cracked recently, and still have the original boxes, discs, recipts and everything;

    Grid

    Call Of Duty 4

    Crysis

    Arma: Queens Gambit

    Oblivion

    Medieval Total War 2 Gold

    Flight Simulator X

     

    And that's just this year. They all get my money - I'm allowed to crack them for my convenience and peace of mind.

  4. if we are going to re-rig a base character we should start from scratch. Not only are the joints off position in relation to each other also the orientation and way you rotate them are far too twisted to fix manually. I strongly suggest to replace the skeleton with a new one like i build last week. The extra Rolll joints in the legs are unnecessary and could be removed.
    No worries - you should just build a new one then, cause I don't know what the requirements are - I know we need special joints for the head attachment, sheathing etc. but not how to make sure that all works.

     

    But outside of that I'm eager to take on any other work. You can do a quick job rigging it, and I can go over it and spend the time fine tuning everything, that could save you time.

     

     

    i don't know exactly what you mean with using layers to quickly convert the animations because i haven't checked the layer plugin yet. But with a character set which you've used already it's pretty easy to transfer the animations done with the last animation rig and edit the keyframes.
    Well you'll just have to trust me - it's easier with layers. You don't touch any existing keyframes. You just add a new layer with ONE keyframe at the very start, for each joint you want to offset. And you offset them in that layer, and the whole animation is fixed. Done. I do it all the time for my old anims, whenever people said "He's not leaning over far enough" or whatever - did I go through and tweak each keyframe for the back throughout the entire animation? No, I always made a new layer called "pose tweaks" and any changes to the overall pose for the entire animation was done there, on the first keyframe.
  5. are you using the current rig to fix these bendings? The new skeleton Springheel and i are testing fixes the bending problems on the fingers, arms and legs because i've set the positions and rotations of the joints straight in the new skeleton (you can import the skeleton.fbx into max/maya to see what we're testing).

    I'm posting these screenshots to confirm we are looking at the same version

     

    The knee is better but it still collapses at only 90 degrees

    knee.png

     

    Same with the elbow

    elbow.png

     

    The "3 fingers" move a lot better, but the rest of the hand still has some incorrectly weighted verts, and the pointer finger bone is still not aligned with the mesh, making it collapse when it curls.

    hand.png

  6. Well we did know what happened to him, as was explained in the member's lounge by NH.

     

    Did you expect an apology or something Dom? Come now, seriously. ;)

    Of course! Why, a team member not doing work for months and months, and then coming back and jumping straight in again as if nothing happened, with no apology, why, that's just dispicable!!!

  7. Hm so you're saying we should go ahead and make a new rig for the pro guard, and make all our new anims on him.

     

    That's fine but I think I'm the only one who can convert the old anims to the new, very quickly, using layers, so I'd have to do that anyway, like I proposed earlier.

     

     

    But as far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with the current skeleton (the one in the game) in terms of what joints are available. Only the positions of the joints in relation to each other, and the subsequent weighting. It just needs tweaking in this manner and re-exported to the game, which I can do. I'll just continue with that for now till I know better about what you need.

  8. Hahah - actually I started this thread, I got it working for him (mainly by telling him to follow the instructions and info from the link in my first post).

     

    It's just that you said - using it without the crack is much better, but from reading your post I couldn't see what was better about it, it just seemed to be more complicated.

     

    Basically I used the cracked exe and got everything working following the instructions on the page I linked to. I didn't have to edit any paths in config files or make a fake zip file, and the ddfix step is as simple as clicking the "apply patch" button and closing the app. DarkWideScreen is what sets the resolution. The rez I wanted didn't even show up in ddfix.

     

    Anyway - I'll shut up, this isn't important.

  9. That's right - if you get winded, and the guard gets winded - then it mostly negates - why bother?

     

    In T2 with the ultimate difficulty activated, when I was playing it a while back - when I got seen, I paid for it. I ran and I ran and I ran... most times the map became unplayable with every guard chasing me, and I had to re-load, if I hadn't already been killed at a dead end. I deserved it. But if I never ran into anyone else, I managed to lose him through quick turns and darkness. VERY TENSE EXPERIENCE.

     

    In TDS, you knew all you had to do was run around a pillar a few times and then you'd be off, safe and sound. It becomes a regular part of gameplay, and trivialises the experience of being chased.

  10. Okay I honestly believe I can do this. 3DS Max allows me to modify the positions of the bones without deforming the mesh, and lets me modify the verticies, without having to re-weight the rig. Layers lets me tweak the animations simply by moving body parts ONCE and it offsets for the entire animation, making it easy to compensate for any change in the rig.

     

    I did a test export from editing the rig, mesh, applying an animation on the mb (following squill's tutorial in the wiki) and it all came out fine.

     

    So there's a very real chance I can get this done singlehandedly.

     

    Spring I was able to straighten the fingers in about 10 minutes. At the risk of stepping on your toes - I would gladly take over any tweaks you're trying to do right now, so that we don't overwrite each others work. With the exception of my birthday on the saturday after this, I'm not doing any other major things until I get this done.

     

    The current rig will cripple every animation and mesh made from this point, including the hundreds of fan missions that will be made, and any of their new models and animations. I can't sit by and let that happen. If I'm going to be animating with it, I don't want to have to hold back due to a poor rig, and I can't expect anyone else to either.

     

     

     

     

    Now here are the main reasons I want to edit our rig. The main problem is the knees and elbows, look at how they bend. It looks bad enough on a heavily armoured guard, but can you imagine how awful this will look on a willowy slender noblewoman?

     

    joint-bending_web.png

     

    Now here is my re-rigged version bending. Like all good rigs, it can bend to 90 and still look ok, and then 45 degrees after that, before it starts to look bad.

     

    newelbow.png

     

    Also, since the fingers are modeled bent they can't straighten properly. Also there are some unweighted verts on the current version, which you can see clearly below. But ignoring that, look at how wonky the fingers look when they are straightened.

    handsneedrerigging.png

     

     

    This is my adjusted mesh with the fingers all aligned instead of 3 of them hanging down in that absurd way

     

    newfingers.png

     

    Now look at how nicely they bend with the bones, and go to the straight position.

     

    fingersstraight.png

     

     

     

     

    I agree we should make a branch, as long as you guys think we can merge it back successfully. How do I make a new branch? I've never done it in SVN.

  11. Uh, yeah. :huh:
    Please don't quote people out of context.

     

    It's great that you've spent so much time on the meshes, I don't think there's a single person on the team that doesn't recognise just how much you've single handedly improved the character model situation in recent times, after the sudden departure of oDDity, and then ascottk.

     

     

    But regarding centering them around the skeleton, I ask you to think of the bigger picture.

     

    It's trivial to tweak the animations using animation layers, when the only problem is offset limbs, which is what centering the mesh around the skeleton will be.

     

    But the main thing is - we are developing a toolset that will be the foundation of HUNDREDS of high quality fan missions - what is re-doing a few animations compared to all that? Especially when we have so many other animations to do.

     

     

     

    I'll prove how easy it is to re-tweak the anims. I'll import the md5mesh and re-center it myself, then I'll re-tweak the most difficult animation - the walk cycle. Using animation layers, it's a simple task to offset the limbs over the ENTIRE duration of the animation just on the first keyframe in a new layer, I do it all the time on my existing animations. And if that works, I volunteer to center the rest of the meshes around the skeletons myself, and tweak all the old animations. I'll even work entire weekends at the expense of my social life. That's how much I believe in the project.

  12. That wouldn't be a problem - the real problem would be detecting when to do it. How to stop it from essentially becoming a sixth sense when someone is nearby - how do you know the real player has seen the enemy yet?

  13. Well that assumption was lost on me - I am used to always losing something in the export process :) So I thought he meant a one-way import, as a visual aid. Which is all I need for animating.

     

    But he's in the middle of a big update, and is about to overwrite the file with his version, so I can't make any changes myself, which is what I was proposing earlier.

  14. I vaugely remember reading someone experiencing the same problem - try reading any posts linked to from my initial link.

     

    Me, I've played all the way through Running Inteference, and about 2 hours worth of Shipping and recieving, and haven't had a crash. But I only play Thief 2.

  15. I think my post was too long and a lot of things got missed, or mis-interpreted.

     

    But none of it's really important now - the problem was that if I animate using the city watch mesh as it is (not centered around) then it will look good for the citywatch and crap on a mesh that has been centered around it properly, like the ones you're re-doing. Also I spent ages hacking motion on those hands for the warm hands anim, it's an unessecary waste of time when the problem is so easily fixed. I'd do it myself but I don't have the source files - which really really should be in models_src like all our other model source files.

     

    The main thing is - if the commoner and builder are centered around the skeleton better, and are representative of how all the final meshes will behave, that will solve everything I think. I'll try and import those.

  16. Hm I figured you might not have time to read the whole thing right away so that's why I started out with that we need the lightwave model uploaded, and the rest is just why. You can't quickly do that yet? It's a shame cause I have a whole day free right now which I could be animating...

     

    We should never upload exported models or animations without the source files.

     

    BTW what Lightwave version are you using? I'm using 8.5, I have to make sure I'm using the same version as you so I can make changes.

     

    We could give 3DS max a go, but I can't do anything until I have the lightwave file.

×
×
  • Create New...