Noisycricket

I have to say i really like it. Looks like it just needs a little smoothing out, but maybe thats just the video. I guess i get to take credit for it since its in this thread.

Do i need to be setting the timeline so the last key is at the end of the timeline? Because i may need to re-submit all 3 animations if thats the case. Also, when changing the rotation order setting, on the shoulder for example, the arm changes position, yet its rotation values stay the same, how do you get the arm back in the exact position so theres no hiccup between animations, or do you just approximate?

The first sneeze animation should be deleted (I think) as it was not using Squill's idle pose. Spit = frame 20 Sneeze is a little more complicated as i kind of built in a little hesitation as the guard figures out whether his body is actually going to go through with it, then all of a sudden it comes on. So there technically a: 1. (optional) subtle breath-in somewhere between 3 and 17 (head going back slowly) 2. (optional) the HA! at 17 (head going back then forward quickly) 3. the CHEW! at 30 (body moves forward, hand meets mouth) New Horizon mentioned putting a sound on the sneeze as well, not sure if he had anything ready or not.

Can i just key the rotation orders as i go like this page suggests? http://iansriggermortis.blogspot.com/2005/...imbal-lock.html EDIT: I just made in two seconds the shoulder movement that took two days of messing with from the arm_scratch animation. Thats going to help.

How about a Balrog? (Perhaps i've gone to far now...) Whats a Balrog?: That which was awoke in the deepest unexplored caverns of Moria, ie, fiery dude from the Lord of the Rings. Speaking of Moria, how fun and scary would that be to sneak around in... I imagine a huge level, where, the first part was like the movie, empty, with narrow ledges and steep traverses. Im just talking out loud here, but that would make for a great game, in and of itself, IMO.

When the proguard is in the idle stance, the blue axis(z) of the shoulder is parallel to the world's xy plane, with the elbow, the green axis(y) is parallel to the world xy plane. Havn't a clue whether that makes a difference or not. Speaking of gimbal lock, i've seen pictures, probably from game development where the character's arms are straight out at a 45 degree angle in front of the character, i wonder if that was to combat gimbal lock. From this quote i read in the Maya docs: "Gimbal lock occurs when rotations about a single axis cause unwanted rotations about complementary axes or when axes become coincident." ...i thought i understood gimbal lock to be any unwanted rotation. Like when you key your arm from the idle position then key the arm scratching the other shoulder. Sounds like maybe im wrong. Anyway, im just talking out loud, you don't need to waste your time teaching me, i'll figure it out eventually.

Bluesnews.com has a photo of zombie doing a pretty good pose at the moment, he looks capable of really hurting you. Its in their title at the top of the page. I might be willing to help with the zombie animations eventually. Just my preference, but i like monsters from the Forgotten Realms/D&D and J.R.R. Tolkien universe's such as goblins, huge cave trolls and dragons, etc over buricks, etc. I'd love to animate a huge cave troll, he'd be compatible with the stock Thief universe i would think and he might be easy to animate, if fact, he might only need one attack animation for obvious reasons....

The channels are muted. You should be able to drag select all of them, then go into the curves tab and choose unmute.

1. Is it important the set the length of the timeline to the first and last key? Well i guess i found a way to work around that. I used "apply pose" in the Trax editor, with the frame a few keys away from the end of the animation, but I still got weird stretching of the model, but somehow, if i moved the key forward, past the end of the animation and keyed there, no problems..., then i just copied those keys from the timeline and pasted them at frame 0.

I love that first model, the Builder Acolyte, very mysterious looking.

Ah, thank you.

I parented the sword to the belt and used the constrain parent function with "maintain offset checked", yet the sword won't move with the belt. Any ideas?

Theres also this, $1 per mocap animation. Probably others too i would imagine. http://www.truebones.com/

Added idle_sneeze and should add idle_spit in just a minute, just have to rename it from why_so_easy_this_time_Maya?....._ARE_YOU_JUST_TOYING_WITH_ME_NOW!!!?!?.bm....

I do use the gimbal mode for rotation, very odd to see the axis planes turn parallel like that. I noticed with gimbal mode the shoulder rotate plane is different than the elbow plane. Is that a bug? The rotation order options in the attribute editor i've never had any luck with. Its just the drop down menu of xyz,yzx,xzy,zyx, etc, right? I never got help from changing them around but i havn't tried much. I found a reference to an addon that is suppossed to help with gimbal lock on the net, but haven't found it yet.

Well, first animation converted over to the newest idle_pose finally done. In fact, just renamed it from Fucking_finally_done!_god_damn_gimbal_lock!_what_the_fuck_is_wrong_with_Autodes k!_DAMN!.bm to idle_scratch.mb. Yup.......should have it uploaded momentarily... Feel free to give feedback.

I wasn't sure I understood what you were saying.

Great, thank you.

oops

I just realised today that the handle of the sword needs to be taken into account with my animations (duh... ) What is the quickest way to get a proguardv2 model with the sword doing the current idle animation? Would using the draw sword animation be ok, just delete the keys and set the idle_pose?

What boggles the mind is if you have 40 keys spread out over 30 frames and you shrink the time over which those keys occur, using either method you described, those keys will not act like breakdowns and retain their proportional spacing. If you had two keys, one at 25.48 and another at 25.51, those keys would then be at 25 and 26 when they used to be only .03 frames away from each other. Going from .0004 seconds to .04 seconds apart. All the others will be pulled apart or drawn nearer as well. With weighted tangents, you could work with the curves to bring the curve's path nearer to its original intended but you would have to do that for every single tangent of every single key. You can continually scale keys, making subtle changed when snapping disabled without worrying about proportional spacing between key being affected, with snapping enabled, you would not be able to do that without keys being potentially 2 or more keys apart from each other at the end of all the adjustments. I can see with proper planning, you could minimize the need for changes to begin by planning out the animation with reference footage. But i've already learned that reference footage is not %100 full proof, the reference video sometimes does not fit the in-game character body type. When i have the arms swinging down and it reaches the end of its travel, i set the hips, spine and upper spine to sequentially move in order, one after the other. I would risk throwing off that timing every single time i scaled that section at a 1/24 resolution. For my arm scratch animation, i have each scratch gradually cover less distance as the AI hones in the the exact source of the itch. The timing for each scratch is also just slightly off. I like this effect and I feel at this stage would have to spend many extra hours in the graph editor to achieve it. It seems that my workload would increase and the time to make each animation would inrease, and the precision of the animations would go down slightly all in the name of....um...what exactly? You do seem know your way around Maya really well from your postings, so I will try and do it your way and hopefully benefit from what i've been missing. (unless i've convinced you otherwise??? )

Ok...here we go...! Finally, i should have some finished work soon.

Oh, i see, your right, i was looking in the darkmod folder. EDIT: Is the final idle anim the idle.ma file? (there is an idle.mb file but the animation has severe twitches in it) I figured i might as well use that to incorporate a small lingering effect of the idle momentums.

Increasing the size of the manipulator is a good way to make finer rotation movements, if you ever need that. You can make it easier to see the individual rotation axes's on the shoulder joint for example and going to Display -> Transform Display -> Local Rotation Axes. Heres it on my idle_arm_scratch: http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=4594201...04e75f6e8ebb871

I can't seem to find a "clips" folder, do you mean the af_pose in the proguard_02 folder?