Model and rig revision

[Tels]

Agreed, I couldn't rig myself out of a paperbag, so hearing about progress in this area is cool

[squill]

The fingers are a little wonky in some of the animations, but I can't tell how much of that is my poor rigging job (I've never rigged anything from scratch before, and the low-poly hands weren't designed with rigging in mind) and how much of it is just the weird hand rigging issues that existed before.

 

There's also a bit of a problem with the cloth skirt clipping through the armour in several animations. I'll play with the weighting a bit tonight and then upload tomorrow so people can check it out.

 

fingers were always a bit of a mess. After uploading i'll check the animations.

[Springheel]

At the moment he's just pointed directly at the citywatch animations. Originally he was a bit shorter than the citywatch, but I'm not sure if there's any pressing reason to shrink him. Both builder guards and citywatch are sort of "default" adversaries, so they might as well be the same size*.

 

I made a few other changes to the mesh--I removed the pauldrons from the model entirely. They can be def-attached directly to the upper arm, which should eliminate any need to animate them separately (and will keep them from pointing out like wings). It also allows mappers to easily remove them if they wish.

 

In order to get the armour-detection system working properly, I had to make the arms and legs the same material. Just looking at the texture it looks like the arms are cloth and the legs are chainmail, but the way the mesh is designed that would extremely difficult to set up. My plan is to make one guard version that is all cloth, and one version that is all chainmail, which could be used for a more 'elite' builder guard.

 

I haven't had any time today to work on the weighting, but I hopefully will by tonight. I'll upload what I have regardless so people can check them out. I'm noticing some strangeness in the attack animations, but most other animations look right.

 

(on the topic of animations, we're going to need a 'draw from back' animation, since the builder guard set doesn't have one currently--although I guess the guards could have their hammers on their belt in a pinch)

 

 

* Of course, if the animations don't have to be tweaked too badly for the builder guard, that opens up the option again of making two different sets of animations (one slightly taller than the other) and letting both the builder guard and citywatch share them.

[Springheel]

I'm experiencing something a little odd.

 

The citywatch skeleton has two specific bones, RightUpLegRoll and LeftUpLegRoll, that are not used by the builder guard. There are no verts weighted to those bones in the builder mesh. Yet when I rotate those bones in LW, the builder guard's leg moves. Huh?

 

Maybe LW is set to automatically assign nearby verts to bones if they have no weightmap? That seems kind of stupid, but I'll have to look into that.

[greebo]

I know not much about skeletons, but maybe these two bones are connected to other bones (in a hierarchical way)?

[Springheel]

I actually tried loading a totally unweighted mesh (the St. Lucia statue) and then loaded the citywatch skeleton, and it still deformed when I moved the bones. So the bones are affecting the mesh even without a weightmap.

 

I'm sure someone who knew LW well could fix that in 5 seconds, but I'll have to dig around a bit to see why that's happening.

 

I wonder if it's possible that I could load a totally unweighted AI mesh and have it work 'out of the box' with the citywatch skeleton? If the exported actually generated a weightmap automatically, that would be beyond awesome. I'll have to test it.

 

edit: Darn. No weightmap info is generated. My guess is that this has no impact on the game character, then, so I probably don't need to worry about it too much.

[Crispy]

Those bones sound like extra controls for the animator which aren't necessarily supposed to end up in the in-game skeleton. I forget the exact term... rigging controls maybe? *shrug* Anyway, their movement is merely supposed to affect the real skeleton, which in turn is weighted to verts. So they will affect the movement of the model even though they're not intended to be weighted to verts directly.

 

I have no idea why you'd see that happening with the St Lucia statue mesh though. Pretty sure it wouldn't work like that in any 3D app I've used (3ds max, Maya, Blender). I guess LW automatically tries to map skeletons onto meshes even without a weightmap. Slightly odd.

[Springheel]

I'm learning a lot about rigging recently, that's for sure.

 

Still have a few bugs to work out, but I've improved a lot of things. There's some issues with the shoulders left to fix, and a couple gaps in the armour that need to be closed. The metal skirt still clips into the cloth when he sits, but there's not much I can do about that.

 

I'll have to remake the shadowmesh--it looks like Ascottk just copied the shadowmesh for the citywatch. The proportions of the two models are different, however, so the shadowmesh was bending differently and casting strange shadows on the visible mesh.

 

The good news is that most of the citywatch animations look perfectly good on the builder, and won't need any tweaking at all.

[Domarius]

Good to know!