Solis' (new) Thread

[Solis]

Should that line be added along with the "anim solis_walk.mb -rotate 90", or should I delete that and only have the one that has a 0 rotation value?

[ascottk]

Should that line be added along with the "anim solis_walk.mb -rotate 90", or should I delete that and only have the one that has a 0 rotation value?

0 rotation. Since I imported the animation with the correct rotation there is no need for a 90 degree adjustment.

[Solis]

OK, here's the fixed version, it should be the right direction now:

 

http://www.geocities.com/canisinvicti/solis_walk-fixed.zip

[Springheel]

I'll try it tonight when I get home from work.

 

It will be nice to get this one out of the way so we can go back to animating our own stuff.

 

On that note, I think that it makes sense to have you work on animations for the fully rigged AI that is going to be most frequently encountered--from what I've seen, the proguard still needs some significant rigging fixes, so the regular city watch would be the next candidate.

 

The following animations would be the next to be worked on:

 

idle, alert (standing, weapon out, more erect, chest out)

Walk forward, alert (weapon out, looking around, could be trouble)

Jump back, startled (totally surprised by something right in front of them--not used if alert)

Pain Animation, generic (torso)

Stagger forward, blinded (alerted, but can't see anything)

[Solis]

Alright, those sound like good places to start. The citywatch was the same model that I animated the throw animation for, correct? Is there a rigged .fbx of it up on the FTP that I can use to animate?

 

Just a few quick questions on the individual animations:

 

In-place animations: what pose should the animations start and end in? The combat/sword drawn stance?

 

Alert: should he be moving his head (and therefor cone of vision) around as he's doing these animations, or should he just be focusing straight ahead of him?

 

Oh, and are the pauldrons now animatable? Those always gave me trouble...

[ascottk]

Alright, those sound like good places to start. The citywatch was the same model that I animated the throw animation for, correct? Is there a rigged .fbx of it up on the FTP that I can use to animate?

I'll see what I can come up with on the fbx. That is if my pc doesn't freeze up while I'm doing it . . .

 

Just a few quick questions on the individual animations:

 

In-place animations: what pose should the animations start and end in? The combat/sword drawn stance?

For the alert anims I think the drawn sword would work.

 

Alert: should he be moving his head (and therefor cone of vision) around as he's doing these animations, or should he just be focusing straight ahead of him?

The sdk/script code has the AI looking around anyway so I wouldn't bother with the head yet.

 

Oh, and are the pauldrons now animatable? Those always gave me trouble...

The pauldrons are rigged to leftpad or rightpad. I don't know anything about motionbuilder but I assume you can do constraints with it. I would contrain the movement of the pads to the LeftArm/RightArm so the pauldrons move with the arms. That'll be a little tricky though.

[Springheel]

OK, here's the fixed version, it should be the right direction now:

 

Yep, I got it working. I notice that the feet seem to sink into the floor a bit when walking (see below), but nothing too serious for now. The only remaining thing is to coordinate the sounds. Can you tell me in what frames the feet hit the ground?

 

The citywatch was the same model that I animated the throw animation for, correct?

 

No, that was the elite citywatch, which won't be used as often. The regular city watch is similar, but the pauldrons are smaller.

 

In-place animations: what pose should the animations start and end in? The combat/sword drawn stance?

 

I don't know, how important is it to know this? Doesn't D3 blend animations? Several of these animations could follow from many different poses--an alerted guard might be in the combat post when he gets blinded, but an unalert one wouldn't be, for example. If you start the animation from an alert pose, does that mean an unalert guard would suddenly whip out his sword when he was blinded? That doesn't seem right.

[ascottk]

Hey, Solis. Here's an fbx of the elitecity:

http://208.49.149.118/TheDarkMod/models/as...ity_fbx-ask.zip

[Solis]

Yep, I got it working. I notice that the feet seem to sink into the floor a bit when walking (see below), but nothing too serious for now. The only remaining thing is to coordinate the sounds. Can you tell me in what frames the feet hit the ground?

Hmm, seems the feet did end up a bit too low. If I have some extra time I'll go back and tweak it to raise either the feet or the entire model a bit.

 

The feet come in contact with the ground (or at least are supposed to look like they do) at frame 14 for the right foot and frame 30 for the left foot.

 

I don't know, how important is it to know this? Doesn't D3 blend animations? Several of these animations could follow from many different poses--an alerted guard might be in the combat post when he gets blinded, but an unalert one wouldn't be, for example. If you start the animation from an alert pose, does that mean an unalert guard would suddenly whip out his sword when he was blinded? That doesn't seem right.

It might make a difference for some animations. Doom 3 will blend animations, but usually it's better to have animations start and end in poses similar to what they'd most likely be in before the animation plays. It's not a huge deal though, just figured I'd ask so that it looks as smooth as it can in the game.

 

For the sword, I think the attachment thing will be done at specific points defined in the animations, but that would only be for the sheath and unsheath weapon animations. After he grabs the sword it would be held in his hand until it plays the sheathing animation, in which case the sword would be reattached to his belt, but it won't put the sword back in his hand until it runs the unsheathing animation again. So we can use the exact same animations whether the sword is in his hand or not based on whether or not it was there in the previous animation. I'll just try to make it look natural both ways (i.e. not have him shield the light from his eyes with his sword hand in case he's holding it at the time, which would make it look more like he's stabbing himself in the eye).

 

 

Hey, Solis. Here's an fbx of the elitecity:

http://208.49.149.118/TheDarkMod/models/as...ity_fbx-ask.zip

Thanks, got it. One thing I noticed though is that it doesn't seem to have the bones aligned to selections under the character control, it's like the Zombie Boney where I'd have to animate the individual joints freehand. But it isn't as big of a deal for animations where the character is stationary, so I should still be able to do the idle and pain animations without too much trouble. Who made the motionbuilder files for the other characters like the elite citywatch? Was that Oddity?

 

Oh, and what are those weird looking spikes that are in and around the upper body of the model? It shouldn't make a difference when exporting the model, but it looks a little strange.

 

Oh, and this is more of a curiosity thing than anything important, but does anyone know why these animations have characters in the default/spread out pose at frame 0?

[ascottk]

It might make a difference for some animations. Doom 3 will blend animations, but usually it's better to have animations start and end in poses similar to what they'd most likely be in before the animation plays. It's not a huge deal though, just figured I'd ask so that it looks as smooth as it can in the game.

I was thinking the same thing.

 

Thanks, got it. One thing I noticed though is that it doesn't seem to have the bones aligned to selections under the character control, it's like the Zombie Boney where I'd have to animate the individual joints freehand. But it isn't as big of a deal for animations where the character is stationary, so I should still be able to do the idle and pain animations without too much trouble. Who made the motionbuilder files for the other characters like the elite citywatch? Was that Oddity?

That was oDDity.

 

Oh, and what are those weird looking spikes that are in and around the upper body of the model? It shouldn't make a difference when exporting the model, but it looks a little strange.

The joints I hope . . .

 

Oh, and this is more of a curiosity thing than anything important, but does anyone know why these animations have characters in the default/spread out pose at frame 0?

In order to convert to fbx, I had to import the mesh in 3ds max then import the animation. You could always delete that frame. If you can't do that then we can define the animation range during the mb to md5anim conversion (-range [start frame] [end frame]) similar to the rotate or scale options.

[Springheel]

Hey, Solis. Here's an fbx of the elitecity:

 

My thinking was that we should focus on the AI that are going to be used most often. The elite city watch is supposed to be--well, elite--and therefore more rare. Wouldn't it make more sense to work with the regular city watch or builder guard, who will be commonly used?

 

It might make a difference for some animations. Doom 3 will blend animations, but usually it's better to have animations start and end in poses similar to what they'd most likely be in before the animation plays.

 

I guess what I worry about is if you started the pain animation from the combat pose (which would seem to make sense) wouldn't that mean if you shot an arrow at an unalert AI, they'd snap to a combat pose before playing the pain animation? That would look more unnatural than just going right into the animation, wouldn't it?

 

That said, the following will be true in the majority of cases:

 

jump back, startled -- starts from idle pose, ends in whatever pose drawing weapon begins in (since the next step after being startled will be to draw a weapon)

 

idle alert--a default for idle AI--basically a regular idle animation, but holding a weapon.

 

So we can use the exact same animations whether the sword is in his hand or not based on whether or not it was there in the previous animation

 

Ok, if you think that works--though in some cases I think a character would move quite a bit differently with a weapon in their hand, especially something heavy like a hammer.

 

There's also the problem of AI that are holding something in their off-hand, like a torch. Not quite sure how to handle that.

[ascottk]

My thinking was that we should focus on the AI that are going to be used most often. The elite city watch is supposed to be--well, elite--and therefore more rare. Wouldn't it make more sense to work with the regular city watch or builder guard, who will be commonly used?

Don't forget I've been mixing & matching AI animations, so what Solis does here can used on another AI.

[Springheel]

I haven't forgotten, but I just assumed it required a fair amount of work to transfer them. Oh well, I suppose it really doesn't matter since it has to be done eventually.

 

Btw, since we'll be using the weapon attachment system, the swords need to be removed from the animations, won't they?

 

The feet come in contact with the ground (or at least are supposed to look like they do) at frame 14 for the right foot and frame 30 for the left foot.

 

Great, the sounds are in there.

[ascottk]

I haven't forgotten, but I just assumed it required a fair amount of work to transfer them. Oh well, I suppose it really doesn't matter since it has to be done eventually.

 

Btw, since we'll be using the weapon attachment system, the swords need to be removed from the animations, won't they?

Great, the sounds are in there.

The swords don't need to be removed as long as they're not in the main mesh. BTW all of the animations still have their swords (with the exception of the fbx I uploaded for Solis). The animations only manipulate model joints & they don't really care if there's extra mesh.

[Springheel]

BTW Solis, I notice that the Thief currently has an animation called 'sword idle' (I think). This is a little more active than the "idle, alert" animation I had in mind (the sword is up as if immediately expecting attack). However, it would make a pretty good beginning frame for most of the alert animations, if you wanted to take a look at it.

[Solis]

Oh, sorry for the late reply, I sometimes forget to come to the forum for a few days when I have other things I'm doing.

 

For most of the animations, I think it should look OK whether or not the sword is in hand. Basically it just requires that the arm doesn't make any quick movements and that the weight isn't being displaced to a place that would make it difficult to balance (for example during a startled jump, making the hand go mostly upwards instead of out to the side). It shouldn't look out of place either way as long as I take into account it will be used both ways, but if worst comes to worst I can modify it later into two separate animations (one with and one without the sword), though that might require some work on the programming side so that we can flag specific animations to run instead of others when a variable like the sword being placed in the character's hand.

 

Although now I'm thinking the pose they should start in for some of these animations should be a slightly more "middle ground" stance instead of specifically an idle one, just something that would look fine to go into whether they're standing normally or somewhat alert. I'll have to take a look at that sword-idle animation you mentioned, do we have an FBX of that animation or only the md5animation file for it? It might work as a starting point for the animations where guards would likely play it in a defensive pose.

 

Work on the guard is going a bit slow, I'm doing the animations freehand again like the zombie since they aren't assigned to character controls. I just end up having to select the bones in the navigator since I can't really select them on the model itself (I've never seen joints represented by those spikes before, I didn't think they were bone representations since some of them were bent inwards inside the model). I think I'll take some time to learn how to align bones to the character controls in Motion Builder, when I get that done I can upload it in a base pose so that anyone else that needs to work on it can do it with the normal animation controls that the older models had. Hopefully on wednesday or thursday since I should be able to dedicate some time to this then.

[Springheel]

I think it should look OK whether or not the sword is in hand. Basically it just requires that the arm doesn't make any quick movements .... It shouldn't look out of place either way as long as I take into account it will be used both ways,

 

Sounds reasonable to me.

 

BTW, what's the status on that throwing animation you did before? We're hoping to have someone get to work on some code to call the new animations, and that's one that we'd like to add.

[Solis]

Sounds reasonable to me.

 

BTW, what's the status on that throwing animation you did before? We're hoping to have someone get to work on some code to call the new animations, and that's one that we'd like to add.

The throw animation was complete, I fixed the sliding issue so it's ready to be implimented any time. But that was made using the old skeletal structure, so wouldn't it not match up to our newer models? If there's a way to convert/impose it on our new skeleton then it should work just fine. Here's the motion builder .fbx and md5anim of it, if either of these will work to convert to our new skeleton format.

 

http://www.geocities.com/canisinvicti/throw.zip

 

It should be fairly easy if it's simply a problem with bone names not matching up, but if we added/removed bones in our new skeleton then it's going to cause issues that may take some time to figure out a way to get it working. In a worst case scenario, I can reanimate it using the new skeleton.

[Springheel]

I didn't think we made any changes to the skeletons.

[Solis]

Oh...I thought that was one of the things that was done while the models were being redesigned these past few weeks...well, just use the throw.md5anim then and it should work fine.

[ascottk]

Oh...I thought that was one of the things that was done while the models were being redesigned these past few weeks...well, just use the throw.md5anim then and it should work fine.

I doubt it'll work because the number of joints between each AI is different. That's due to some inconsistent rigging on my part & the way maya handles rigging. I never truly know what part of the mesh is rigged what joints. Sometimes its hard to tell.

 

So if you have maya binaries please make them available.

[Solis]

The maya binary is the same as the fbx, just imported and resaved in Maya. Here's the one I used to make the throw.md5anim file:

 

http://www.geocities.com/canisinvicti/throwmb.zip

[ascottk]

Uh oh, I think backwards compatibility, or lack thereof, strikes again I take it your using maya 7? I only have 6.5 so I can't read Domarius' binaries either. But there's more than one way to skin a cat md5 importers

[Solis]

Doh, yeah, Maya 7. Thought everyone was using it now.

 

Hmm, can you import the .fbx in Maya? If so, it should be the same as the MB file that I created. I'm not sure if those files are backwards compatible with earlier version of Maya either though.

 

And you could always download Maya 7 if nothing else

[New Horizon]

And you could always download Maya 7 if nothing else

 

..or he could...'borrow it'...from me.