Noisycricket
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Posts posted by Noisycricket
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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.
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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.
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what is different?
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.
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Is this zombie of yours going to have the zombie animations?
Or is he going to have the same proguard animations?
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....
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The channels are muted. You should be able to drag select all of them, then go into the curves tab and choose unmute.
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1. Is it important the set the length of the timeline to the first and last key?
2. I had luck using the idle_pose for the first two animations i uploaded, after some trial and error, but the idle_spit is giving me problems. For the first two, was somehow able to right click on the idle_pose in the visor and click "apply pose", then set keys, all done. I get an error: idle_pose:idle_pose is not attached to a character(use copy and paste to apply it to a character). I had this before but i can't remember what i did specifically that solved it.I tried using the Trax editor, but after deleting the keys and 0 and setting the pose at frame 0 in the Trax editor, when i keyed the frame the model would go crazy( legs out the the front and back and the kilt( or whatever its called) would sretch out to 4x its actuall length.
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.
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I love that first model, the Builder Acolyte, very mysterious looking.
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Ah, thank you.
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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?
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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....
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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.
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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.
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Ah, yes, I seem to have misunderstood that one.
I wasn't sure I understood what you were saying.
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Great, thank you.
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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?
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You don't need half frames to create "high quality" animation. Good animation comes from good timing, strong poses and knowing how to move in and out of those poses (animation principles). I take on the traditional way (2D) when it comes to 3D animation. A frame is basicly just like a drawing, only we don't have to draw 24 frames for 1 second of animation. The computer only just draws the frames for us between poses (keyframes) that you would normally have to draw in 2D animation.
If you place the keys on the right frames and control the curves in the graph editor you have enough control to edit your animation and create very subtle movements. Again i'm talking about the graph editor but it's an essential tool to refine your animation. It makes the scene very messy when you have keys all over the place and scaling or looping makes it even harder. For games it's also nicer to work with frames per second because coders usually think in seconds, minutes or hours
If i need to scale an animation, i could do this using the scale option in the graph editor(edit -> scale) or select all frames on the timeline between frame 0 and the last frame to scale it manually. There's an option called snap (RMB on timeline -> Snap) which snaps all keys back to whole frames between the first and last frame.
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???
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Ok...here we go...! Finally, i should have some finished work soon.
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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.
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Oh my, finally found it. I found a way to decrease the size of the manipulator by pressing Shift-Minus on the Numpad. No idea how this got changed, I certainly didn't do this on purpose.
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
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I tweaked the pose by lifting the hips some more and placed him more in a balanced position. Also increased the length of the animation to 3,5 seconds. I saved a separate version for the wider posed arms -> idle_armsWide.
the separate idle_pose can be found in the clips folder. Noisycricket, do you already have access to SVN?
I can't seem to find a "clips" folder, do you mean the af_pose in the proguard_02 folder?
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I was thinking it was a good choice precisely because it seemed much easier to edit...
You can shift+left_mouse and drag-select on the time slider and shrink or scale a section of the animation at will to adjust and play with timings without worring about key being on mathmatical whole unit having nothing to do with the animation. If you do that with the keys snapping to whole numbers, or the dope editor, it ruins your animation timing. To put your marker exactly on a key to overwrite it or copy/paste etc, simply use the < and > keys to position the marker on the closest adjacent key. You can still use the middle mouse button to re-position the marker and set a key without cycling the animation. How does one properly scale the 40 frames animation full of keys with keysnapping on? I really wanted to aim for high quality animations here squill. I don't know what you mean by "clean" or how that helps ( I can't imagine at the moment), but I don't want each of my animation keys off by a almost a full second, nor do i want to edit, minutely, the animated positions of joints for each key because i wanted to scale the animations, then had to use the snap function thereby shifting each key to it closest whole number. I plan on spending a lot of time on my animations, eventually re-doing my animations done for TDM 1.0, if that eases your mind. The only possible reason I can fathom in this universe for saying snapped animation is easier to edit (but not scale) is that when re-positioning the timeline marker with the middle mouse button, it doesn't automatically set itself to on top of an existing key thereby making it more difficult to overwrite it. I have gotten over that hurtle myself by lowering the dpi setting of my mouse and can place the marker over a key such as 82.35, but that was not actually needed as i'd already found that you could key next to key you wanted to overwrite, then delete the key you wanted to replace and move the replacement key over the deleted one. I really don't want to compromise the fineness of my animations for the sake of what sound like the visual "benefit" of keys on whole numbers having no real mathmatical relationship to the animation. Again, been wrong before on occasion... But please, unless im missing something, please afford me this "concession". Please keep in mind that trying to do high quality anims is the fun part for me. 
Sorry if this seems too blunt, I didn't develope very good communication skills much as an only child of a non-talkative father who was my only parent, nor in later life...
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How can I get Maya to load some textures on the model so i can animate with something that looks more natural? I noticed while playing around in the attribute editor tabs that i would sometimes get an error: can't find C:\gaming\doom 3\.....\something.tga file. How do you edit that address?
Noisycricket contributions
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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.