Heavy Characters

[Springheel]

Noisycricket (or anyone else looking for something to animate) I'm going to be rigging some heavier characters shortly, like the forger. They'll need some new animations, as the current idle has their arms too close to their body. They probably will need a new walk and run animation as well. If you're looking for something to move on to, that would be something we will need for our next update.

[greebo]

Looking forward to those characters!

[Noisycricket]

I'm now taking an animation class which simultaneously introduces 3D Studio Max on Mondays and animation on Wednesdays. It also has homework. (Tutorials of all things! yeah, i could have done that myself thanks! but heres $1,400 anyway... ) So im busier than normal, but I'll do it when i can.

 

How does this fit in priority wise over female walk and sitting animations? Is squill done with the sitting ones?

[Springheel]

I think it is probably our first priority out of those three. I won't be rigging female characters until after the heavy characters.

[Noisycricket]

Is a skeleton with a heavy model available in .ma/.mb format?

[Springheel]

I don't think so. It will be the same skeleton as the other characters though. Is it necessary to have the actual model?

[greebo]

I don't think so. It will be the same skeleton as the other characters though. Is it necessary to have the actual model?

I suppose it's easier to animate if the mesh is the same as in-game.

 

Is it hard to import a weighted md5mesh into Maya (not sure if I asked that before)?

[Noisycricket]

No clue if that would help.

 

Squill?

[squill]

I suppose it's easier to animate if the mesh is the same as in-game.

 

Is it hard to import a weighted md5mesh into Maya (not sure if I asked that before)?

 

it's not hard to import an md5mesh with animation into maya. But you can't use it to animate with. It would be nice to have the mesh of the heavy character on the animation rig but i guess springheel is using LW to rig that character?

 

Right now i don't have the DM installed because i had to format my drives lately. I'll soon have it running again but i have maya installed if i need to check up on things.

[greebo]

So the LWO format cannot be imported? Which format did you use to import the proguard?

[Subjective Effect]

I'm dreaming of undead and especially the Revenant.

[squill]

So the LWO format cannot be imported? Which format did you use to import the proguard?

 

the proguard is our main character for animation since most characters are based on his dimensions. I never worked from any imported meshes or skeletons. A quick solution would be to import the mesh into the animation rig and parent some of body meshes to the proguard so we would have some reference of the proportions. Another would be to just weight the mesh on the (animation) rig in maya.

[Springheel]

the proguard is our main character for animation since most characters are based on his dimensions. A quick solution would be to import the mesh into the animation rig and parent some of body meshes to the proguard so we would have some reference of the proportions.

 

I'm going to start rigging him today. I should have a md5mesh version by the end of the week if that helps.

[Noisycricket]

Springheel, can you put this character into the test/idle_animations map?

 

btw: whos idle is that? Squill? Its very nice. But maybe whoever did it would like to modify it for the heavy chars? I'ts easy, ill do it, but just want to make sure squill wouldn't prefer to change it.

[Springheel]

Springheel, can you put this character into the test/idle_animations map

 

I'm still playing with the weighting a bit (it's a pain trying to keep his legs from clipping through the apron) but I'll add him when he's finished.

[Springheel]

Ok, I'm not getting very far with this guy. He works, but he doesn't look very good, and I can't tell how much of that is poor weighting and how much is the animations not fitting. Definitely he can't use many of the default animations.

 

I've updated the md5mesh version and added the character to idle_animations map--feel free to modify the weighting to whatever you need. I don't think I'll bother with any other heavy characters until this one is working and I can use him as a base.

[Noisycricket]

I see its going to need a lot of attention. Looks like deleting the vertices behind the apron would prevent the red shirt from coming through. I wonder if that would work on the legs too? I think the belly fat, from the chest to the belt should move as one entity and be weighted to something other than the spine joints, so that it can sort of sway behind the body movements. The walk looks decent.

 

(I wonder if the new programmer wants to develop a fast [read: FAST!!!] cloth simulation...

[squill]

it might be best to weight the mesh of this character on the animation rig. Because i think it's going to be hard to switch back and forth between maya/ingame and animating on model is just much more faster.

[greebo]

How can one approach that? Or who can do that?

 

I'm trying a quick google.

 

edit: is it possible to export the weights of the LWO and import them to the anim rig? Or would that be highly incompatible?

[squill]

well by just weighting the mesh to the skeleton. I'm willing to do that. The weighting of the model itself is not a problem for me, but the exporting of the separated body meshes i always found a bit troublesome. That's why i believe Springheel did much of the character weighting in LW.

 

Even if i only have a roughly weighted heavy character on the animation rig will help the animation process for any animator using it.

 

i'm still downloading the mod and it might be finished later today so i can take a look at it.

[greebo]

When exporting the .md5mesh it's just a matter of taking care that the shaders are exported correctly, right? Like "tdm_npc_hands" for the hand mesh, etc. So this should be just a matter of assigning the various shaders to the body parts, or do they need to be split into separate objects as well (like in Blender)?

 

(Or did you mean something else?)

[squill]

When exporting the .md5mesh it's just a matter of taking care that the shaders are exported correctly, right? Like "tdm_npc_hands" for the hand mesh, etc. So this should be just a matter of assigning the various shaders to the body parts, or do they need to be split into separate objects as well (like in Blender)?

 

(Or did you mean something else?)

 

yes the assigning of shaders went fine. I had some problems with the proguard hands which had some flipped uv coordinates which i couldn't seem to fix in maya 7.0 but i'm using maya 2008/2009 for some time now so i'll have to see what happens during exports. I believe the body parts still have to be separated for the different textures.

[greebo]

This gets me thinking: maybe me or Springheel should also learn how to rig a character in Maya? This way we have a unified working base for our future characters and this might speed up the process (animators already have a rigged version available to produce anims).

[Springheel]

well by just weighting the mesh to the skeleton. I'm willing to do that. The weighting of the model itself is not a problem for me, but the exporting of the separated body meshes i always found a bit troublesome. That's why i believe Springheel did much of the character weighting in LW.

 

The current forger is already divided into submeshes reasonably well (I still have to add a shadowmesh, I realized), but that can easily be done after he's reweighted in Maya.

 

This gets me thinking: maybe me or Springheel should also learn how to rig a character in Maya?

 

I don't think the actual weighting process is all that difficult, as long as you understand how the skeleton works. I tried it a few times a year or so back, though I'd pretty much be starting from scratch now. I doubt I'll have time to take on that kind of learning curve for a while.

[greebo]

Hm, I'll read through a few tutorials to get a clue about skinning in Maya. Maybe I'll try to rig the revenant to the animation rig, this sounds like something different for a change. It's likely that I perform an epic fail, but who cares.