Pauldrons

[Springheel]

How are we handling characters like the citywatch, who have pauldrons? Right now they're weighted to leftpad and rightpad, but those joints don't appear to actually move with the animations--the arms clip right through when sneezing, etc. Should I be weighting them to a different joint?

[Noisycricket]

I am re-submitting the sneeze animation tonight i could try and make some changes so it doesn't clip through, is there a guard with pauldrons i can use to check my work?

[Springheel]

I'll be uploading the citywatch shortly.

[Springheel]

Ok, citywatch is up. All citywatch in maps are now using new skeleton.

[Noisycricket]

Can't seem to import the mesh + skeleton into Maya with the .md5mesh file. Just the skeleton comes in and its positioned horizontally. Can you upload an .ma file, or am i unsurprisingly doing something wrong?

[Springheel]

I don't have a maya version of the file. If you want to load it in Maya you'll need to download a md5mesh converter. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...l=md5mesh++maya

[Noisycricket]

Yes, thats was i was using, odd.

[Noisycricket]

I was not able to successfully troubleshoot the import problem, but i did see them in-game, with greebo's help and i now see the clipping. That is very troubling. So is the huge gap between the shoulder and the back of the pauldron when the char moves his arm forward. I'd try and investigate the issue closer, but i don't think i have the current city-watch model/skeletons, or i don't know which file it would be, if it exists. Are you building/editing these using Dark Radiant? Sorry for all the questions.

[Springheel]

I'd try and investigate the issue closer, but i don't think i have the current city-watch model/skeletons, or i don't know which file it would be, if it exists. Are you building/editing these using Dark Radiant? Sorry for all the questions.

 

The file is models/md5/chars/guards/tdm_ai_citywatch.md5mesh. It uses the same skeleton as the proguard. I'm using Lightwave to work on the character meshes...I can provide you with the lightwave file, but it's probably less useful in Maya than the md5mesh.

[squill]

i was thinking about this, because the pauldron joints don't move along the arms you could animate them separately or you could parent contrain those joints to the arms/shoulder joint.

 

extreme example with a arm parent contrain:

sneeze

 

the pauldrons clips thru the body in this example but with a few small tweaks you could make it work. Otherwise you could also add a dummy object to the pauldron joints on the proguard for visual reference.

[Springheel]

the pauldrons clips thru the body in this example but with a few small tweaks you could make it work.

 

I don't think it's realistic to try to eliminate all clipping, just the worst of it.

 

because the pauldron joints don't move along the arms you could animate them separately or you could parent contrain those joints to the arms/shoulder joint.

 

I could easily weight the pauldrons to the arm_dummy joints if that would help. Whatever is going to be easiest for you animators.

[Domarius]

I'd say weight them to a joint that's a child of the upper arm, so it moves with it by default, and then we can tweak that joint seperately in special cases where the clipping occours.

[Springheel]

I'd say weight them to a joint that's a child of the upper arm

 

Which joint do you recommend?

[Domarius]

Ahh... after looking at this in depth I think what we need to do is re-parent the pad joint to the shoulder joint. This gives the best movement. I think in the vid, squill, you parented it to the upper arm joint. If it's parented to the shoulder, then it doesn't move when the arm moves, just when the shoulder bone is manually rotated, which is what we want.

 

I tried it out temporarily on the source mesh for the proguard - it was easy enough, and looked great, but I don't know how this would impact all the animation work that's been done so far...

 

 

(And I just noticed we have 2 breast bones - never spotted this before, because they're just called joint9 and joint8. But this is great! Well not just for womens breasts, but we can make our characters breath now...)

[Springheel]

I'll try weighting them to a different joint, like arm_dummy, and see what happens. Switching them to a different joint is pretty trivial.

[Domarius]

That will move it with the shoulder, which is good, but won't let us pose it seperately without moving the arm (that bone moves the upper arm), so you may as well be weighting it to the shoulder control directly.

 

I'd like to see what squill says about re-parenting the pad bone to the shoulder bone, that would be the best solution if it doesn't mean too much re-working.

[squill]

I'd like to see what squill says about re-parenting the pad bone to the shoulder bone, that would be the best solution if it doesn't mean too much re-working.

 

The fastest way is to indeed parent constrain the pads to the shoulders like i did in the vid for the upper arm. It's a small tweak to add to the animation rig and we'd still have individual control over the pad joints if needed. Constraining is not the same as re-parenting joints, contrains are easy to add or remove.

 

Us animators must be aware to animate the shoulder controls if an arm rises above a certain height and i've seen a few animation which only uses the upper FK arm controls.

[Domarius]

Ah okay I didn't understand there was a difference. Can you show me how to "parent constrain"? Is this something that only applies on a per-animation basis?

[squill]

If you wondered why i didn't respond the past week it's because I've just come back from the Annecy animation festival in france. I still have to read the new posts and see what changed

 

Back to your question, i'll apply the contrains to the animation rig. If some animations need those constrains we can transfer those to the updated rig version and all newly created anims will already have those constrains.

[Domarius]

Sounds good to me! It's not important enough to re-apply to every existing animation if it doesn't need it.

[squill]

Sounds good to me! It's not important enough to re-apply to every existing animation if it doesn't need it.

 

Exactly, I've just submitted the updated rig. It's simply done by selecting the shoulder joint, select pad joint -> Constrain -> parent (in animation toolbar). If you want to unlink the parenting either delete the contrain(parented under the pad joint in the outliner) or set the weight to 0 in the toolbox menu.

[Springheel]

Do I need to change anything with the way the pauldrons are weighted (or anything else)?

[squill]

you don't have to change the skin weights. If the pauldrons are weighted to the pad joints like the proguard it should work.

[Springheel]

The skeleton isn't changing then?

[squill]

nope..only applies for animation/animation rig.