Model and rig revision

[oDDity]

I've been revising the citywatch model. I kept it to adjust the proportions rather than remodeling anything, which would mean redoing textures. I also adjusted the rig which was in a shoddy state, it wasn't even symmetrical and the knees and elbows were misplaced, and it seems that no attempt at all was made to line the bones with with the claw hand, which I've also replaced and reverted to the old hands, because I think it's been established that it's not the poly count that's a factor now that shadow meshes have been introduced.

It's probably not worth while completely redoing the rig. I think this one can work pretty well with these adjustments.

This is the revised model, and I also threw a mo cap on it, and it works well with no tweaking at all.

I'm going to do a general guard patrol animation for it, one based closely on the speed and gait of the T2 guard walk.

The only walk anims really needed are a patrol walk for the guards, and a faster walk for regular NPCS, one male, one female.

http://www.pixelwerks.be/files/guard.avi

 

 

[Springheel]

So....how many of the changes I just finished making to the mesh two weeks ago are now obselete?

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...st&p=151102

[greebo]

The model looks good.

 

The only walk anims really needed are a patrol walk for the guards, and a faster walk for regular NPCS, one male, one female.

I'm not sure what you mean here. We have three different walk animations for the guard right now: walk, walk_suspicious and another one (searching, I think). Plus the run animation.

[oDDity]

I just mean as far as regular walks. There were plans for having different walks for different guards etc, but that's not going to happen. We're 4 years into the project and we haven't' even got ONE good walk yet.

 

The changes to the regular guard are obsolete, yes, but the other models can still be used.

TO be honest I don't like the idea of people fiddling with my models anyway. As far as I'm concerned those ones are entirely your models now, and I won't be touching them.

I'm not sure why you added a quiver to the city watch guard anyway. I'm going to model a separate archer.

[New Horizon]

I really appreciate the work odd, but is this rig going to work with all the existing model variations that Spring cooked up? Springheel spent the last year or more making all these great variations, so if this suddenly makes them obsolete...we're back to square one. You weren't here, so somebody had to step up and work on the models and make variations. It's unfortunate that you weren't here to oversee the 'fiddling', but if you're saying that this new rig will not function with Spring's work, then we're no further ahead. Hopefully this is some kind of base rig your setting up that can be transfered from AI to AI...or if you're willing...you would setup a clean base rig to work with all our different AI, even if you refuse to make any physical alterations to them artistically.

[oDDity]

Well of course this will work with other models, but I'm not going to put all the work in myself to adjust and weight all of the model variations to this rig.

People can use my new models as templates to adjust the other models so they can be used with this rig.

[squill]

Looks good, this rig doesn't include any of the dummy (unnessecary) joints?

I'm curious about how the existing animations will work with this new setup.. have you synced this rig already so i can start building some controls around it.

[oDDity]

I didn't alter the rigs joints yet, since we hadn't agreed that and it might mean altering the def files and break some things, but it would be easy enough to build a new simpler rig and snap them to the joints of this rig, so there will be no problem transferring animations, also making sure the joint rotations are the same.

This current rig is ok now that I've adjusted it, and it does work well with motionbuilder, with all the correct joint names so you can do an auto IK/FK rig setup in motionbuilder.

[greebo]

Can you upload the current files into a new folder in the model_src repository? I think it is better to handle this new rig separately until we've figured out how we handle the existing stuff, and it makes sense to have it in the repository so that other people (=squill or me) can look at it.

[oDDity]

It's not really a new rig, it's the same one that's been adjusted, but I'll upload it and the tweaked mesh.

Here's the guard patrol animation as well.

 

http://www.pixelwerks.be/files/patrol.avi

 

Next I'll tweak the builder guard in the same way and attach him to this rig and walk for the release map.

[squill]

It's not really a new rig, it's the same one that's been adjusted, but I'll upload it and the tweaked mesh.

Here's the guard patrol animation as well

 

looks relaxed althoug a bit swimmy. Meaning i see some jittering in his movements.

have you animated this by hand or with motion capture and why are his pointer and middle finger crossed?

[oDDity]

I can't get the mayaexport dll working, so I can't extract any of these models into doom. I've tried it on xp and vista, both version 7 and greebo's 8.5 version. I think it might be because I am using 64 bit Windows.

Here's the maya file with the tweaked model and rig and the animation and the fbx file.

There's no point in me working on this any further if I can't extract my models and animations to doom, it's just going to be a big pain in the ass getting someone else to do it all the time.

Anyway, this can be used as a template if you guys ever do want to revise the other model setups.

 

http://www.pixelwerks.be/files/guardrevision.rar

[squill]

i've tested importing existing fbx files onto this rig but it's just giving me more unwanted results (screwed up fingers, head mesh translated etc.) instead of the current rig which imports fxb just fine.

 

I guess the only issue came from the builder guard which wasn't using the same joint setup as the citywatch. If all other characters are using the exact same setup like the priest, forger etc. it should be working fine. Although the joints may be not aligned correctly and have rotations to them... it's now the fastest way to get things done.

[oDDity]

What version of maya are you using?

You'd have to export this maya file to motionbuilder first and then apply the other animations to it there as actors or skeletons.

[Domarius]

@squill - that anim is just the walk from the mocap library oDDity uploaded to the FTP, it was just an example.

 

@oDDity - it's been hell animating the hands all this time!! I really hope your change helps, I'll be very appreciative. Of course I'll have to re-do the hand anims (eg. warm hands by fire) since I had to basically "hack" them to work (bending things in ways that didn't make sense but ended up looking right) but if it actually works properly from now on I won't care.

[oDDity]

Well I still kept the existing 3 fingered hand bone rig. It would probably be best to make it a real 5 fingered one, but I don't want to change too much in case it breaks all the other models.

IN any case all the other model variations will have to be reskinned to this skelington (love that word), so if changes are going to be made, now is the time to make them.

I finally got the maya export dll working for version 7 of maya, so I an do a bit more on this.

[squill]

What version of maya are you using?

You'd have to export this maya file to motionbuilder first and then apply the other animations to it there as actors or skeletons.

 

For this i used Maya 7.0. I returned the rig in t-pose and imported one of the plotted animations. The way it was always done to get fbx into maya.

 

@oDDity - it's been hell animating the hands all this time!! I really hope your change helps, I'll be very appreciative. Of course I'll have to re-do the hand anims (eg. warm hands by fire) since I had to basically "hack" them to work (bending things in ways that didn't make sense but ended up looking right) but if it actually works properly from now on I won't care.

 

Main problem with the hands are the rotations and rotation orders (see image). Probably most of you have never worked with rotations orders when creating joints. These tell the joints in what order a joint can rotate to avoid getting a gimbal lock and unwanted motions.

 

I also never though about the way joints are orientated when rigging a character but when i came to understand more about rigging i found it very important to setup what rotation orders a joint should have. A lower arm and upper arm for example have different rotation orders. Well this is maybe a bit too technical but you can find more about this on the web, i'm just pointing out what could be improved in future revis.

[oDDity]

Yes, I know all about going into component mode and setting the joint orientations, I had the original skelington hands set up like that, but I didn't make this new 3 fingered hand, it was done later for the low poly hands.

I will just setup a proper 5 fingered hand then and make that the new standard hand.

 

@For this i used Maya 7.0. I returned the rig in t-pose and imported one of the plotted animations. The way it was always done to get fbx into maya.

 

 

Yes, but motionbuilder is much better at coping with sharing animations between different skelington hierarchies than maya is, so it's easier to do it there.

[Domarius]

Having 3 fingers is no problem - it's just the spastic behaviour I always get from hands when I'm animating them. Rotating the joints don't do what you think they will - they stretch the fingers out in really demented positions, and you keep randomly adjusting the joints till they sort of mush into an acceptable shape - HUGE waste of time.

 

And on top of that, the left hand fingers randomly decide to rotate in circles during animating, even though no key frames get set on them. Well technically they do, when animating in full body mode, but nothing is moved. But I solve it by constantly deleting the keyframes from the hands after keying things in full body mode.

[squill]

Having 3 fingers is no problem - it's just the spastic behaviour I always get from hands when I'm animating them. Rotating the joints don't do what you think they will - they stretch the fingers out in really demented positions, and you keep randomly adjusting the joints till they sort of mush into an acceptable shape - HUGE waste of time.

 

yes that's what i pointed out in the previous pic. I think the current 3 finger(joints) are good enough to do most animations. A full hand just creates more animation work.

 

And on top of that, the left hand fingers randomly decide to rotate in circles during animating, even though no key frames get set on them. Well technically they do, when animating in full body mode, but nothing is moved. But I solve it by constantly deleting the keyframes from the hands after keying things in full body mode.

 

why don't you animate in body part mode? Then you don't have key's on all parts and it's easier to manage your keyframes.

[greebo]

Sorry to sound a bit unsure, but what's our current plan regarding the animations? Are we going to fix the builder guard's rig so that the citywatch animations can be applied or are we choosing a different approach?

 

From what I've gathered, it's just one or two joints on the builder guard which are causing a mismatch?

[oDDity]

I completely rebuilt the skeleton now. Apart from the fingers it only has 22 joints now. I added proper 5 fingered hands because you cannot properly control the bending of 3 loose fingers with one joint since they are different lengths.

Finger animation is not a big deal anyway, it's either in the default relaxed pose I used to have as the default, or it's gripping something. There's no need for complex finger animations. The old claw hand just looked so terrible I has to replace it.

What is the sword_cube piece of geometry for? Is that used in doom for something? I have a sword bone and a bone at the back for attaching a bow or hammer, and I kept the knee bones since I remember they are used for IK in doom.

Also, what about the shadow mesh, does that have to be weighted to the skeleton and exported along with the regular md5mesh?

All remains to do now is to tranasfer al lthe aniamions onto this new rig which shouldn't be too much trouble using motionbuilder.

[greebo]

Finger animation is not a big deal anyway, it's either in the default relaxed pose I used to have as the default, or it's gripping something. There's no need for complex finger animations. The old claw hand just looked so terrible I has to replace it.

Does this mean the U/V layout of the existing citywatch model has been changed? We have a lot of skins available for the regular citywatch model and it would be a shame (not to say inacceptable) to lose those. These skins should stay applicable.

 

I'm still confused about all that rigging/modeling/skeleton talk. Does having a new skeleton mean that we can apply this to the existing citywatch model without having to alter the actual mesh?

 

What is the sword_cube piece of geometry for? Is that used in doom for something? I have a sword bone and a bone at the back for attaching a bow or hammer, and I kept the knee bones since I remember they are used for IK in doom.

I cannot say what the sword cube is for, unfortunately. Maybe some old forum posts can be found on that topic, but this was surely added before my time. I'm not an IK expert too, so I can't help here much at all, I'm afraid.

 

Also, what about the shadow mesh, does that have to be weighted to the skeleton and exported along with the regular md5mesh?

Does the existing citywatch MD5mesh contain a shadow mesh? If yes, then I'd guess the answer to your question is yes too. Ascottk or Springheel might know more, though.

 

edit: Looking at the existing tdm_ai_citywatch.md5mesh, I can confirm that there is an actual shadowmesh in there (the shader is textures/common/shadow).

 

All remains to do now is to tranasfer al lthe aniamions onto this new rig which shouldn't be too much trouble using motionbuilder.

Beware that we have .mb files for the animations almost exclusively. There are only a few .fbx files, the rest is .mb all the way. Don't know if that is a hinderance when migrating animations or not.

[New Horizon]

From what odd said previously, my understanding is that we should be able to apply the new rig odd created to the existing city watch as well. Springheel created far too many alternate skins for it to simply be tossed out. Oddity, I'm not sure, but I think you might have been under the impression that we completely went Frankenstein on your models, but that's only half true. They're using D3's skin and head swapping...so if we were to switch over to your new model...we would lose all the weeks of work done to the existing model. Ideally, the new model would still be compatible with the new skins. I suppose we could try it and see what happens...but worst case scenario, we would have to keep both.

[oDDity]

I haven't changed the Uv mapping on the citywatch model at all, so I'm sure the different skins will still work.

However, for any actual model alterations SH has made away from the default citywatch model, he will have to take his models, adjust the proportions using this new model as a template and then weight it to the new skeleton and export the md5mesh.

All the animations will work.

I'm going to do this for the builder guard as well, and the city watch elite.