Player Character animation discussion

[Muffinmix]

This is a bit out there but I'm making an armed suit (a mini mech) for blockland and I have a few misconceptions with the animation steps.

Source (you may need to be logged in, don't worry sign-up is free and it's a Garage Games site): http://tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/DTS/3dsmax/Creating_a_Simple_Character

I've noticed that some of the animation examples take care not to overlap frames. "Root" takes up frames 0 to 30, while "Forward" skips to 70-100. "Back" also takes 70-100 but you never go Forward and Backward at the same time so it makes sense in this case. I think this is to allow certain animations to Blend while letting other animations to Override, which would be why your block-dude can flail his arms around while walking but you'll never see him, say, crouch and "walk" forward at the same time.

One thing that's been bothering me is whether the amount of Frames in all the individual animations matter, like whether Root should always be 0-30? Then another question is how exactly I would go about exporting the animations? I'm using Milkshape so I gather I'll be exporting each individual animation through .dsq files, but then that leaves a few questions regarding the whole Overlap stuff, namely whether I need to leave, say, 0-70 as empty frames and animate 71-99 for the Back and Forward animations (seeing as 70 and 100 will be essentially "empty" as well).

Then another question is whether I can add extra animation Sequences? The mech has hands to do stuff like punch things and hold giant mech weapons with, and it would be pretty awesome if I could animate the individual hands and create several different sequences for them (like maybe some rude hand gestures or something, just an example). The arms will probably also have several different individual sequences.

I'm not really expecting a straight answer to all these, so I'm open to some brainstorming to try and figure this stuff out. Feel free to discuss any Player Character topics here too while we're at it. There hasn't been allot of ground made by the community on player characters yet so it's a bit of a mystery.

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[Reactor Worker]

I too would like to see more development with custom character models as so far all we have is a spider and a horse outside of the normal avatar.

[Packer]

Player Animation is probably the hardest things in 3D Modelling (atleast for me) to do. Not only making the animation look right but to make each sequence go in the right order so you model doesn't start doing multiple animations at once.

[Muffinmix]

In case you guys were wondering, this is what I've made so far after 2 days of modeling



I know this isn't very blocky-looking and the poly count might give some of you a heart attack (Haha) so unless this turns out to be a smashing success I don't think I'll be releasing it. I'm attempting to make it mostly out of personal interest but also so I'd be able to post whatever I learn from the process to help others make some simple mechs for Blockland.

Once the basic model is done I'll be inserting interconnected joints, basically a skeleton, into the model. If my guess is right, the skeleton will help restrict the model when it runs through multiple animations in-game.

The only part that's going to take a very long time is all the Animating. Luckily I think I can actively export the model and test out each animation as soon as I finish them. This will probably be the last step after I finish flatshading, adding the cam/eye nodes, and after adding some collision boxes and all that stuff.

(The model is based loosely on the Armed Suit from Ghost in the Shell in case you guys were wondering. I put a 1x scale minifig inside it)

Player Animation is probably the hardest things in 3D Modelling (atleast for me) to do. Not only making the animation look right but to make each sequence go in the right order so you model doesn't start doing multiple animations at once.

This is what I'm really afraid of. I'll have to plan out all my animations before making them, otherwise something will undoubtedly screw up. I'll post that plan on the forums once I get everything ready for animation

[Packer]

It'd be nice to find a tutorial for MS3D for basic TGE Character implementation. I should start looking :D

[Muffinmix]

It'd be nice to find a tutorial for MS3D for basic TGE Character implementation. I should start looking :D

Yeah it would help tremendously. I figure the rules with MS3D aren't exactly the same as 3dsmax

Edit: The model is finished. I'll try to spawn it in-game as a wheeled vehicle just to see if it's up to scale. Then I'll start testing out the animation stuff like "root" and see if I can spawn it as a player character vehicle.

The red highlighted figure inside it is a mini figure

[Muffinmix]

Alright my mech has a complete Skeleton and all the groups have been assigned to their respective joints. Right now I'm not too sure about which Special Named Joints I'll need and what to do with the dreaded but needed collision boxes.

Node names Source: http://fosters.realmwarsgame.com/tools/DTS_Nodes.pdf

For the special joints: so far I have an Eye joint placed in front of the visor, a Cam joint placed a bit farther back, a Ski0 joint placed under the Right Foot, Ski1 under the Left Foot (not too sure what the Ski# joints do exactly though, I figure they're for skis or something). I'll need to have some Mount points as well, namely one in each hand and one inside the mech (where the player's block dude will stand inside), but I'm not sure what to number them.

As for the collision boxes, I'm not sure if I should have multiple boxes and have them included in the animations (having the boxes animated along with the model). This might not be a good idea, I dunno.

Some extra stuff, I'll be making some brick-spawnable weapons for it, so I'll need to figure out how to get the Mech to equip the weapons from the inventory without the player equipping the weapons on his own Mount points. This means the Mount numbering might need to be a bit stranger, or maybe it's doable completely via script, I dunno.

[Packer]

I find it easy to open files off Blockland in Torque Pro Show Tool and find out what joints/numbers are where.

[Muffinmix]

I find it easy to open files off Blockland in Torque Pro Show Tool and find out what joints/numbers are where.

Where might I find this awesome tool?

I'll make a google search, I feel dumb for asking when you basically gave the full name to me

Edit: Looking at the horse I found a few things

- There seems to be a "main" node placed at the very base of the model, and it's centered. I'm not sure what it does. There's also a "start" node set directly on it.
- Mount 0 and 1 appear to be the Right and Left weapon mounts, respectively.
- Mount 2 is the player's mount
- There are mounts 3 to 6 but god knows what those are for, mount 3 is located at the horse's mouth
- There is no Cam node, so 3rd person view might not need a cam node at all in Blockland.
- The Eye node is oddly located well behind the horse's head, over the saddle, so apparently the model might be invisible in 1st person

Animation wise, the horse only has a few animations, so it's inconclusive. I'll need to look at the player character

[Muffinmix]

Ugh, I can't get the damn thing to appear in the Add-ons list. I'm going to need to figure out what the hell is keeping it off the list, even with a server file to execute it present. It might be because I used the horse script and just replaced all the "horse" lines with "minimech". I also make sure I package all the files into a Zip file called Vehicle_MiniMech.

I'm starting to wonder whether you need some kind of magical process for character vehicles in Blockland, and what I did wrong in the first place.

[Wedge]

The mount in the mouth is for the brick weapon that lets you build.

[Muffinmix]

The mount in the mouth is for the brick weapon that lets you build.

Oh yeah, that explains it.

Edit: I got it to spawn once, but there wasn't much to look at. The only thing that rendered on it was the last thing I modeled, which was a red lens disc thing. I've had a problem like this before but I can't remember how I resolved it.

So I added in a 100 LOD onto one of the groups, renamed a few groups to get rid of the numbers at their end, and tried again, now it crashes outright as soon as it spawns. I added a collision box, still it crashes outright in the same manner. I'll try a few combination of things and maybe dumb luck will see me through this problem.

[Reactor Worker]

Model is too complex to fit the rest of blockland. Would be better overall if you kept the design simple.

[Muffinmix]

Model is too complex to fit the rest of blockland. Would be better overall if you kept the design simple.

I don't care if it "fits" or not, I'm not making it so I can release it. This is purely an experimental process to figure out how to make player character vehicles in blockland with animation involved. After I'm done I'll be posting all my findings in a neat tutorial to help people out seeing as there are literally no MS3D player character creation tutorials anywhere at all apparently.

If I wanted this to be a crowd pleaser I would have given up by now, trust me. I'll let you guys try to figure out what the hell everyone wants.

[Packer]

This thread is Player Character animation discussion, very relevant to my interests. I would like to learn to proper way of doing it rather then guessing and having a crap load of errors D: