Nevermore!

[Springheel]

Here's the raven I'm working on. I'm going to use him to learn how to do a simple skeleton and basic skinning. I wish I was better at uv-mapping though, as that part is taking quite a while. I'm not planning on going overboard with this...if I can rig it just enough so it can look around and play a simple idle animation or two, that will be enough. This is more for ornamentation (on rooftops or other places the player can't really get to) rather than interaction. The model is about 800 tris with a shadowmesh of 250.

 

 

(don't mind the texture, it's just a wip diffuse at the moment)

[ascottk]

Hehe, I love ravens! It's looking great so far!

[Crispy]

Sweet!

 

Hopefully someday, probably after 1.0, someone will make a flying animation for him (complete with a transitional launching-into-the-air animation). Then we could have him fly away (with mere simple scripting, not proper AI) if the player passes by / gets too close / whatever.

[Tels]

Sweet!

 

Hopefully someday, probably after 1.0, someone will make a flying animation for him (complete with a transitional launching-into-the-air animation). Then we could have him fly away (with mere simple scripting, not proper AI) if the player passes by / gets too close / whatever.

 

Cool, ravens add a lot of athmosphere

 

Soundsnap only has crows, tho. Wonder if any birder will play Thief and notice the difference? Or we just name the model "crowy"

 

http://soundsnap.com/search/audio/raven/score

[Baddcog]

Don't know how you're going about UV mapping Spring but the easiest way would probably be to:

 

1:delete one half of the raven (right or left)

2:detach the wing

3:detach the tail

4:detach beak and foot

5:detach eyeball

6:(Max, not sure how Maya works here)

Clone all pieces and move to the side. place each piece so it can be planar mapped in one view (rotate tail 90 degrees ect...)

7:attach pieces in certian order

8:uv map planar (foot might take more work than explained above)

9:attach all pieces of original mesh in exact order of flatten pieces mesh

10: use morph modifeir on flat mesh, select original shaped mesh as the target and the flat mesh should 'pop' into shape.

11:clone and mirror finished half

12:attach both halves.

 

Hope that helps

[Springheel]

Thanks for the tips. I'm using Lightwave, not Maya, so I'm not sure what the equivalent of some of those would be, especially #10. I actually own a copy of Unfold3D, but I keep forgetting to learn how to use it.

[Subjective Effect]

Ravens to scare and alert guards would be great! Imagine climbing a tower and edging along a sill and oops, just disturbed that raven and so alerted the guard with the crossbow in the other tower!

[Springheel]

Yeah, they'd be great sentries for mages or pagans as well. We could probably set something up so that animal's "alert" barks trigger some minor suspicion in AI who hear it.

[Komag]

Ha! A guard raven, that would be cool! The raven would caw loudly, and you'd hear the pagan inside the window say "Elroy has spotted something, better check on that!"

[Subjective Effect]

What about a zombie raven for the Revenant? I seeeeeee you.

[jdude]

OHHhh this is awesome! We need a canary too for coal tunnels and such!

[Crispy]

In Maya I usually select the faces that I want to UV map and then do a planar UV map on it (or whatever type of map is appropriate), so that it only affects the selected faces. Less invasive than physically tearing the whole model apart.

[Springheel]

Well, progress. I've gotten the md5mesh in game and it looks fine. Currently it rotates in place to watch me, but it doesn't appear to turn its head randomly for some reason.

 

More concerningly, D3 crashes repeatedly after about 45 seconds of my sitting there watching the raven.

[Domarius]

and after seconds of ten times four,

D3 crashes, as before,

and the raven cries "Nevermore."

[jdude]

I cannot wait to see this working in-game

[greebo]

More concerningly, D3 crashes repeatedly after about 45 seconds of my sitting there watching the raven.

Well, I'd like to help, but I assume the raven is not in SVN?

[Springheel]

No, not yet. If I can't narrow down the problem I'll upload it. I want to make sure it's not something stupid like the origin being buried in world geometry or something.

[PinkDot]

If you want the raven to be fully animatable in the future, its wings should be modeled as well. From what I see now, they are a solid part of the body at the moment.

 

@Badcog - your way of mapping models is really a painful way - it's actually the opposite way it should work. As Crispy said - you don't have to detach model into pieces - you just select faces, give them rough mapping coordinates (planar, spherical or cylindrical) and then tweak the position of vertices. (using Unwrap UVW in Max).

 

@Springheel - I'm not sure how advanced you are but usually people use some checker type texture while unwrapping. This gives you an idea of the way pixels are stretched and scaled on the model. When you're happy with UV layout, (pixels are relatively same size and not stretched too much) you paint a texture in Photoshop according to it.

[Springheel]

@Springheel - I'm not sure how advanced you are but usually people use some checker type texture while unwrapping.

 

Yeah, I've recently started doing that, but it's the seams on organic models that cause me the most headaches. What I think I really need to check out are endomorphs.

 

If you want the raven to be fully animatable in the future, its wings should be modeled as well.

 

That's nice, but frankly I think it's more work than it's worth. Animating a flying bird so that it looks even half-way natural would be a large undertaking, and ultimately not worth it IMO. If someone wants to take that on in the future, more power to them, but I'd like to move onto the human AI as soon as I feel confident I've figured out how to do so.

[Springheel]

Well, I'd like to help, but I assume the raven is not in SVN?

 

Hmm, I thought the problem might be that I left some animations out of his def file, but adding them doesn't stop the problem. Although it now seems like I can stand around for quite some time without it crashing, but when I start to approach the raven, it still ctds.

 

I'll upload the relevant stuff to SVN.

[greebo]

I could reproduce the bug. It happens in idPlayer::FrobCheck():

 

if( ent->IsType(idAFEntity_Base::Type) )
{
idAFEntity_Base *afEnt = static_cast<idAFEntity_Base *>(ent);
idAFBody *AFbod = afEnt->GetAFPhysics()->GetBody( afEnt->BodyForClipModelId(trace.c.id) );
if( AFbod->GetRerouteEnt() && AFbod->GetRerouteEnt()->m_bFrobable )
	ent = AFbod->GetRerouteEnt();
}

 

Then, in idPhysics_AF::GetBody(0), the self pointer is NULL and the body list is empty, so there is something not setup the way it should.

[greebo]

The AF cannot be loaded in idAFEntity_Base::Spawn(). This is due to the "ragdoll" spawnarg being empty. All other AI do have this spawnarg, so I guess this is a must-have.

[Springheel]

Ah, ok, thanks, greebo. I haven't created a ragdoll for it yet. Is there any kind of dummy variable I can use?

[greebo]

I've virtually no experience with AFs, apart from my little toying around with the rope arrow AF, so I can't help you there. Looking at the darkmod/af folder, it seems that each animated entity needs an AF, no dummies there.

[Tels]

I'll upload the relevant stuff to SVN.

 

Springheel, just a little thing

 

I saw you also uploaded a new quill and feather skins etc. plus some changes to the undef.def files. in the same revision, maybe by accident?

 

Anyway, should I make moveables out of the quill and feather?

 

Also, I would feel a bit better if the model was named "quill_and_feather", the "&" sign can create problems in shells etc if it is not properly escaped - under linux/unix/posix/whatever, the "&" puts the process in the background.

 

This means:

 

"cp quill&feather.lwo foo.lwo"

 

is interpreted as "cp quill&" (put into background and then fails) and "feather.lwo foo.lwo" (which also fails as feather.lwo is not a valid command).

 

Yeah, it can be worked around, but it also might cause a lot of head scratching in the future when it fails