Builder Animations

[oDDity]

Yes, fully articulated fingers, there's no reason not to have them rigged and weighted that way becasue you never know when you're going to need them - that's why I've made the hands with quite a lot of polys so the points can all move.

The heads will be animated separately at some point, with movable eyes and maybe even some basic lip sync, because we want to swap heads on the models for variety. I haven't looked into exactly how this is achieved yet though, but it's the method they used for the doom characters so it cant be too difficult. You will be storing the animations in .bip files anyway, so even if the characters to have to be re-rigged minus their heads at some point it won't be a problem.

And a note about that model. Set the smoothing angle to 180 degrees and weld all the verts, since Max has a habit of unwelding along texture seams on inported models.

[mrdes]

I might be doing something wrong here but importing the model seems to give me a fully triangulated model. I can still work with it if we can't figure out how to keep them in quads when going from Maya to Max, but it'll be a bit more confusing when they're all tris already since its kinda difficult to clearly see where you intended for the model to deform.

[oDDity]

THe model *is* in tris. I modeled it that way, it has to be in tringles for the Doom engine. I think it's pretty clear where the deformations should be anyway.

I can install Max and rig it for you.

[mrdes]

Oh woops. I thought it was like Unreal Tournament for example where you model it in quads then the engine triangulates it for you when it puts it in-game. No worries though I'll manage. It was just that I've usually only rigged models that were mainly quads.

[mrdes]

Ok the rigging is pretty much all done. Had some problems mirroring it because I didn't even realize the model wasn't completely symetrical heh. It took a couple hours in total. I was wondering how long it took you to rig him though. I just kinda want something to compare to so I know how slow at rigging I am heh.

[oDDity]

Building and orienting the skeleton, weighting and then setting up the rig controls take me about an hour. Of course in CS, your rig is auto built so you just have to fit it to your character and paint the weights, its all has to be done manually in Maya and I don't mirror anything either.

I've rigged a lot of charcaters though (in Lightwave, Max and Maya), and I made the model, so I know its layout very well.

Maya has the best rigging and weighting tools.

[mrdes]

Woah. It'd probably be much quicker if you handle the rigging next time heh. I'm going crazy still tweaking some areas that aren't working too properly. Having a bunch of problems with Max's vertice painting this time around.

 

edit: 5:30 in the morning now and I'm finally done rigging and tweaking with it

[oDDity]

I'd be a bit rusty rigging in Max these days, I haven't used Max in about a year, but he principals of weighting in a lt he apps is the same. Don't get too hung up on perfect weighting and deformation - I know I don't) I, or you can always can always tweak the weighting after the animations are done anyway.

You shoudn't sit up all night like that either. this is a long term project and you don't want to burn yourself out too soon. It very difficult to keep your initial enthusiasim up over a long period of time.

[mrdes]

It's no problem for me. I work like this pretty often. The only difference now is that it's even more interesting and I'm already learning faster especially with a team of experienced people around.

 

Anyway I should be able to manage rigging with Max. I could use the practice.

[miketrujillo]

So I got CVS to work though I'm not sure about all the files - I dont have doom3 installed - -- -- how do I access the assets to rig, anim etc.. what are model filenames and folders etc...

 

Also i see mrdes has rigged a character - but in max. Should that rig be used throughout or can we mix the rigs on the same char?

 

also i generally add extra joints rather than paint weights for rigging - - i assume this is a no no for this project and the fewer joints the better?

 

anyway thanks for the pointers guys and hope to get some motion done soon

 

whoopee! mike

[oDDity]

THere's no problem with extra joints, but no, you cannot use the animations from two different rigs on the same characters. In fact, even if you tried to build an identical rig in maya with the same bone names the eported MD5 anims would not work on on mrdes's MD5mesh.

Of course, we could have two different builder guard MD5meshs and anim sets, you wouldn't notice the difference in the game if they were swapped for different anims, but there's really no need for that. There's plenty of animation to be done on other characters. Mrdes is doing the bulder guard which requires a lot of his own anims anyway. You can start on the forge worker or the priest/acolyte/prelate, or the revenant or the noble woman or the city watch guard.

Take your pick and I'll link the relevant file here.

[oDDity]

I was thinking that the city watch guard and Builder guard could share a lot of the same animations. They both do pretty much the same job. We don't want to be doing a separate set of animations for every single character, nice though it would be. There are going to be more than 50 characters in the game, including mechanical beasts, spiders, zombies and other creatures, so we're goign to have to think of animations a lot of the humanoid charcaters can share, with small tweaks.

Mrdes can use his stored .bip files in Max and apply them to the city watch guard as well, with a few tweaks, rather than someone else startring them all from scratch.

[Springheel]

My thought is that Mike can start on the robed characters, since there are already three ready. Gives the most bang for the buck right now.

[miketrujillo]

Can I get the geometry for the robed characters springheel mentions?

 

Mike

[oDDity]

You won't be able to rig the priest in a t-stance, so you;'ll have to angle the arms at 45 degrees because of the cape.

 

Robed Builders

[Springheel]

Just to reiterate what I said to mrdes--it's probably best to start with the stage 1 and 2 animations from the master list, although if you want to add some of the random 'flavour' animations for their idle state (cracking knuckles, sneezing, etc), it wouldn't hurt. The robed builders will have some of their own unique animations but we don't need to worry about them yet.

 

In terms of style, the builders are a proud, rigid organization. The priest should have grand, almost arrogant movements. The other two should seem much meeker, and perhaps have their heads down most of the time. The robed one really IS meek, as they are just lowly acolytes. The one with the breastplate is actually quite powerful, but looks very unassuming until aroused. The prelate's movements should be fluid and subtle, like a martial artist.

[Springheel]

How are things going, Mike? Any progress?