Blender's sculpting tool

[Arcturus]

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.

Does code support maximally two animations: walk and run? Or is there possibility for let's say: walk - trot - gallop? I would also like to make some more idle animations first.

[Ishtvan]

Does code support maximally two animations: walk and run? Or is there possibility for let's say: walk - trot - gallop? I would also like to make some more idle animations first.

We can support more animations easily, so that's fine.

[Tels]

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?

 

Yes, the belcher has a larger one and would be good to use.

 

Also, can we remove the old horse now?

[Ishtvan]

I'd prefer not to remove it just yet until we're sure that everything works on the new horse. That will require some testing time. The old horse is useful for comparison to get everything working. For example, old horse's ragdoll more or less works, and the new horse's AF crashes the game right now.

[greebo]

I had the first chance to check this out in-game now, and all I can say is excellent work, Arcturus! The horse looks very convincing and the idle animations really add to its life.

 

I'm not sure whether the actual size is close to a real horse (it seems like a Pony to me, but I'm by all means no horse expert).

 

Very good stuff - I hope you can find some time to explain the non-obvious steps of exporting stuff from Blender to D3 on our wiki. Or are the tutorials on D3world enough for anyone who is inclined enough?

[Arcturus]

Thanks Greebo. I made second idle animation in which it moves his legs (and origin). When added to def as idle2 then front of the horse takes frames from one animation and back from the other, which looks wrong. I also made trot animation which is current run animation. I assigned footsteps sounds to proper frames. I will make gallop later. Right now I'm working on a flag model to put my jolly roger on.

As to size of the model. It looks smaller from player's perspective. If you put NPCs next to it, it seems bigger:

 

I'm using script from this guy: http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=1711 to import/export md5. I could write a note about it.

[Ishtvan]

Are all of our AI at their correct and final size? I seem to remember that the Builder guard was definitely sized correctly, but I'm not sure abou the other ones.

[Springheel]

The commoner, citywatch, builder guard and priest all are. The others are hit and miss.

[Ishtvan]

Hmm, well it looks okay in relation to the priest above, but I agree it looks a little small ingame. Maybe the other horse is just a little big and I got used to that?

[Arcturus]

Quick comparison:

[Springheel]

Maybe the other horse is just a little big and I got used to that?

 

Are you remembering back when the thief was smaller? Remember that he is the same size as the citywatch at the moment.

[Springheel]

Yeah, the horse is looking pretty good. The animations are pretty natural, though the texture could use some sprucing up. And is it just me or does he growl?

[Ishtvan]

He growls, he's using a Belcher script apparently.

[Crispy]

Man, Arcturus creates a mean horse.

[Ishtvan]

I implemented the trot animation while riding the horse and adjusted the min/max animation speeds accordingly.

 

Right now the code only supports a walk and run animation, but @Arcturus if you want to do a gallop go ahead, that code is pretty easy to change to make it support N different animations instead of just two.

[Arcturus]

I uploaded the gallop animation.

[Tels]

I implemented the trot animation while riding the horse ....

 

Wow, you can implement animations on horse back! Impressive, young coder!

 

[Ishtvan]

I uploaded the gallop animation.

Okay, I'll see about modifying the code to take an arbitrary number of animations for different user requested speeds. Might not happen for a few weeks.

 

Wow, you can implement animations on horse back! Impressive, young coder!

Sometimes, but I have to roll against my Mounted Archery skill and pass a saving throw against Tailbone Jarring or the spell is interrupted.

[Arcturus]

Okay, I'll see about modifying the code to take an arbitrary number of animations for different user requested speeds. Might not happen for a few weeks.

Is it possible to make 3 different animations for non player ridden horses?

I swapped the trot animation with gallop in def file if anyone wants to check it.

 

Currently I'm working on some sculpture:

 

[Ishtvan]

Is it possible to make 3 different animations for non player ridden horses?

Short answer: Probably not before 1.0 release. That would be a lot harder than switching the animation due to player request. We'd have to change all the AI code and scripts to allow for more than two speeds. Currently there is only one flag that allows for 2 speeds: AI_RUN. When true, they run, when false, they walk. We can do things like swap animations in particular AI states (in some alert states they use a cautious walk instead of a regular walk), but that still takes work.

 

In what situations would the horse decide between walk, trot, and gallop? Since we don't have AI stamina and a galloping horse will never get tired, when would the horse ever want to trot instead of gallop?

[Arcturus]

My idea was that horse should not imediately go from slow walk to full gallop cause it doesn't look very natural. It doesn't look that bad either so it's not a big problem. Riding a horse is different thing cause currently when walk animation is speeding up the footsteps don't sound properly so there should be other animation between.

On the other hand troting between walk and gallop is not realistic, it would be rather slower gallop (canter).

Those things are not that important. I think horse can wait until after the 1.0.

[Arcturus]

Final high poly model - 890880 quads:

[SneaksieDave]

Recently trying some modeling really fosters deep respect for this (and the horse). I must ask, how do you make the low poly version? Working backward from this or start over and just trying to make them line up properly.. in every.. single dimension...... My inkling would be that starting low and going to high would be easier, but I don't have anything to base that on besides a guess. Another: is something like the horse fully extruded, or built up poly by poly, or some other technique I don't even know of?

[Arcturus]

I start with low poly model, but I don't spend much time on it because it's boring.

 

 

Of course the more detailed the easier and more clean the sculpting will be.

Then I use "multris" option in Blender. Adding 1 level of multirs devides each poly into four.

 

 

This model has 7 levels:

 

 

The rest is only sculpting.

Multirs is a cool option cause you can go back and forth from one level to another.

 

 

Working with milion polys on my machine is a little difficult so I sculpted the basic shape on level 6 (222720 quads in this case) and only face details on highest level.

 

 

As for final low poly version. I could simply use level 1 (430 polys after converting to tris):

 

 

but it has too little polys on face and too much on larger, flat surfaces. That's why I'm going to use poly reducer script. It takes vertex weights into account, so you can paint for example the face and after conversion it will have more polys than other areas. You can of course set level of reduce.

[SneaksieDave]

Wow, that gives me a lot to consider. Thx!