Blender's sculpting tool

[Arcturus]

Okay. I added a shadowmesh. I tried to make it completely hidden inside of visible mesh so it's rather thin. I made two animations: walk and idle. Walk has 48 frames so it looks good when played with at least 30 fps. I added one bone as player joint but it will be tweaked later on. Md5 files are now in https://darkmod.homelinux.com/svn/model_src/horse. Anyone willing to make a def file  ?

edit: I've just read about the origin bone. Have to change it.

edit2: I think I totally screwed up the bone hierarchy. I have to rethink it all.

[Arcturus]

So it has to be single chain for legs: origin - upper leg - lower leg - foot, or else AF won't work? I should have thought about it earlier.

[Mr Mike]

Okay. I added a shadowmesh. I tried to make it completely hidden inside of visible mesh so it's rather thin.

 

Why go to efforts to make it entirely within the mesh? The player will never see shadowmesh ingame and it can be turned off when browsing models. I'm just curious

[Arcturus]

I want it to cast shadows on the visible mesh e.g. one leg on another. If I understand it right sticking out shadow mesh would cast unwanted shadows on the model's surface.

[Springheel]

If I understand it right sticking out shadow mesh would cast unwanted shadows on the model's surface.

 

Yes, that's correct.

[Ishtvan]

For inspiration on the joint hierarchy, you could take a look at the Doom3 "pinky" which is a four legged creature. You'll probably have to extract if from the game pk4 files in the /base directory.

[Arcturus]

Thanks for the tip. I'm redoing the walk animation.

[Crispy]

Aww. Having to redo things sucks.

 

It's looking awesome though, so I'm really looking forward to seeing it in action! Keep up the excellent work!

[Arcturus]

Thanks Crispy. I only had to redo legs. Current bone scheme is:

 

 

		origin
	        - butt
	                  - first leg 
		              - second leg
		              - tail
		        
		    - chest
	                  - third leg
		              - fourth leg
		              - neck
	                         - head
	                                - first ear
		                            - second ear
		              - player (I will rename the bone to rider)

 

Few questions. Are "_" and "." marks allowed in bone names? And how to place joints. In Dram's there was separate chain for rider: origin - body (that bone doesn't have any vertex groups) - saddle - rider. I have rider's bone attached to chest. If we want to have in the future saddle and harness we will need joints for them too?

[Ishtvan]

Few questions. Are "_" and "." marks allowed in bone names? And how to place joints. In Dram's there was separate chain for rider: origin - body (that bone doesn't have any vertex groups) - saddle - rider. I have rider's bone attached to chest. If we want to have in the future saddle and harness we will need joints for them too?

I think "_" should be allowed, not sure about "." but I don't see why not.

 

Technically you don't need a separate joint for a saddle/harness if you don't mind its position being referenced to some other joint. For example, if you add a saddle that should always track with the with the chest joint or rider joint, our attachment system says, "this saddle is always X,Y,Z offset from this joint ant pitch,yaw,roll rotated with respect to that joint"

 

So you don't need different joints for every attachment if it's okay for them to move along in reference to some other joint.

[Dram]

Nice

 

Speaking of which, I assume the walk animation I did for the previous horse is unusable here as the bone hierarchy is completely different correct?

[Arcturus]

Yes. But it was good animation, really inspiring

All md5 files are uploaded to https://darkmod.homelinux.com/svn/model_src/horse. I would like to ask someone else to write a def file and set up the rag doll. I suck at it and it would take much time untill I figured it all out. I'd rather focus on making more animations and additional textures.

Man, this horse has taken me already four months of life  It was rather exhausting, but I think I've learned a lot

[Springheel]

A def file is relatively trivial, but setting up a ragdoll is not (as far as I understand it). While it will eventually be nice to have an animated horse model, it is not a 1.0 goal and should be left until after the release.

[Dram]

A def file is relatively trivial, but setting up a ragdoll is not (as far as I understand it). While it will eventually be nice to have an animated horse model, it is not a 1.0 goal and should be left until after the release.

 

Hmm, well currently Blackheart Manor uses 2 horses in the stables. I could theoretically remove them of course...but they are oh so fun to ride....

[Ishtvan]

Hmm, well currently Blackheart Manor uses 2 horses in the stables. I could theoretically remove them of course...but they are oh so fun to ride....

Well we definitely can't use the ones with the stolen model in our official release

 

I can look into setting up the def file for the horse. If it has a non-crashing but otherwise somehow screwed up ragdoll in TDM 1.0, that's probably fine.

[Dram]

Well we definitely can't use the ones with the stolen model in our official release

 

I can look into setting up the def file for the horse. If it has a non-crashing but otherwise somehow screwed up ragdoll in TDM 1.0, that's probably fine.

 

Well I know that of course. I mentioned right from the start that it has to be changed.

[Ishtvan]

Okay, I added a def file and a placeholder ragdoll, it can be spawned ingame under atdm:ai_animal_horse_tame2 and atdm:ai_animal_horse_ridable2.

 

Something seems off with the textures [EDIT: Nevermind, fixed by adding material file.]

 

There were also some errors with the exported MD5 animations. @Acrturus: You might want to talk to other people who have exported MD5 animations for our AI to see why this is happening. I don't pretend to understand anything here, I just tweaked the files by hand until the errors went away:

 

The AF_Pose had a nonzero numAnimatedComponents, whereas the other horse had zero animated components for this particular anim. I set that to zero by hand.

 

The "bounds" field was not right, it was all zeros for one, but it was also one line shorter than it expected, so I copy/pasted the previous line.

 

In the idle and walk animatins, the "bounds" field was again all zeros, but was also one line longer than it expected, so I deleted the last 'bounds' line by hand in both files.

 

The horse disappears when you get close to it, maybe because of the "bounds" being set to 0 issue in the animation? Also, the shadow is a weird tiny rectangle with some graphical artifacts.

[Ishtvan]

Actually its shadow is fine when viewing from some angles, but it gets clipped strangely, like what used to happen for our AI. Was that related to 'bounds' in the animation?

 

Also the anim channels are not quite correct right now, so its front and back legs have different rates of speed applied to them when you ride it. That can be fixed later.

[Arcturus]

I exported animations from Blender using script I found on net. Obviously it's not perfect. I'll check it when I'm home. I will have to learn about those 'bounds' more.

[Tels]

Okay, I added a def file and a placeholder ragdoll, it can be spawned ingame under atdm:ai_animal_horse_tame2 and atdm:ai_animal_horse_ridable2.

 

The new horse seems to use AAS48, which sounds wrong Good work, btw!

[Arcturus]

Shadow is screwed only on idling. While walking it looks good so it must be those bounds. I don't know why they didn't export.

EDIT: Ok, it's because you have to export md5mesh and md5anim at the same time. Exporting animation only works but bounds are not in anim file.

EDIT: I uploaded fixed idle and af_pose md5anims. Shadows are working

[Arcturus]

I've set visible mesh to noshadows. Only shadowmesh casts shadows now.

[Ishtvan]

Cool!

 

As for the AAS48, I copy/pasted that from the existing horse def. I agree that's probably not the best thing to be using and will cause them to clip into some stuff. Not sure if we already have an AAS for larger animals. Maybe the Belcher?

 

Do you have any plans to do more animations for it? The vehicle code supports switching to a gallop at a certain speed input, so that would be good. Later on, we could probably use animations for rearing up slightly when you collide with things, and also a jump animation.

[Crispy]

So I take it we have an actual, working, original horse in-game now.

 

That's awesome.

[Ishtvan]

Yep, it is exciting.

 

The ragdoll caused a crash to desktop when I frobbed it for some reason, I'll have to look into that later.