Elite Search

[Domarius]

*sees new post and gets all excited to see crits and clicks thread*

 

...

 

Fine. Just fine. Screw you gahs, ahm goin' hewm.

[Springheel]

It looks good to me Dom, but I'm not very astute when it comes to animations.

 

I know Ish was saying we should use separate AF's for the model, so we should make sure that it's possible to make them see-through for the AI.

[Domarius]

Oh yeah, his sword might be a different object...

 

That's fine, I can move his sword out of the way of his face if that's a problem.

[Ishtvan]

Yeah, we can also set the "opaque" flag to zero on the sword to make them transparent, but actually I think that was set in the SDK, so we may need to do some coding for that.

[Domarius]

I played the anim front on, and it's not directly in his face. If you look at the below screen shot, imagine - that it only shifts either side about one sword blade's width at the most, so never actually goes in front of his face. Is this okay, or is it still a concern?

[Ishtvan]

I wouldn't worry about it. We should figure out how to set the sword not opaque to AI since the player could be standing slightly to the side, within the AI's cone of view but still be blocked by the sword. It could be that AF attachments aren't even set opaque to AI by default, since stuff like moveables wasn't even set to be opaque until we fixed it. We just have to check it.

[BlackThief]

managed to export the search anim, however after exporting I noticed that the sword animation somehow got lost during the conversion to maya - I looked at it in motion builder and it looks fine there, but after importing it into maya the sword somehow flows in the middle of nowhere...domarius can you check if everything is setup correctly in the fbx file? I tried importing several times, but it's always the same problem

[Domarius]

This is a question for oDDity, I'm afraid. I don't know anything outside of Motion Builder at the moment, and everything is fine in there. At least - if there's anything extra I'm supposed to do, I don't know what it is.

 

Maybe Maya / Doom needs to be told properly about the extra sword bone? Just a theory.

[oDDity]

I always animated the sword in maya. YOu should get hold of a copy domarius, or maybe BT can do it, it's just a matter of setting up a parent constraint between the hand bone and sword bone.

[BlackThief]

ok that works, but his fingers are in a quite loose position - he doesn't seem to grap a heavy sword - can you fix that in motion builder, dom?

[Domarius]

Well I would if I had time. If you can do the sword it shouldn't be much different to adjust the fingers too, it should only have to be done once and it should stay that way for the rest of the animation. If not - then I wouldn't let that prevent you from getting this in for the milestone...

[Springheel]

Eventually the sword won't be part of the model though, right? We're going to bind a separate model to the hand in another way? Otherwise the sword does weird things like teleport back to the sheath when they're knocked out, among other things.

[Domarius]

Yeah eventually. I don't know how that works yet either.

[Ishtvan]

The sword should be an AF attachment, and probably switch between attachment points at the hip (frog) and attached to the hand when drawn. That way it can drop from the hand wherever it is if an AI with a drawn sword dies, or it will still be on attached to the body if they die without drawing it. So the actual animations won't involve a sword at all, except maybe a frame command to switch the attachment point from hip to hand when drawing, and vice-versa when sheathing. That makes the most sense IMO.

[Domarius]

Okay, whatever you say Just tell me what I need to do when the time comes.

 

We will probably need to collaborate on this sometime.

[Ishtvan]

Yeah, I'll need to add a frame command to change the AF attachment bone, if there isn't one already. Then they'll have to spawn with the sword on them, and we'll have to model the sword separately. That will work out well when they are killed/ko'd with the sword out and drop it as a separate item though.