Enrique

From my experience, a deform bone (a bone that the name doesn't start with "prop-" prefix) without influencing any vertices throws an error in atlas. Animation states (walk, run, death, etc) are inherited by the childs (props), but not the speed of the animation. The speed is the constant that the animation loop plays when the unit enters that animation state, so the "structural" mill animation can be tuned to conform the walking donkeys separately.

About the rotary mill donkeys animation: There's a way to animate the rotary mill (although this is not the thread to discuss it) and avoid making the full 360 circle animation which would be a very big animation data file. It should be as follows: - The actual part of the mill that rotates should be a prop attached to the main structure. - This Mill rotating thing should have two prop-bones where the donkeys will be, these prop bones must be parented to the bones that makes the thing rotate. - Make a small looping walk animation for the donkey. - Apply the donkeys where the prop-bones should be and give them the walk animation loop, so they will play the walk animation while the rotation of the parent will make the illusion that they're walking. Of course the speeds will need to be tuned so there's no slide-effect going on. The problem I was talking about in the IRC is that prop-bones do not record animation . This means that you can animate them in the armature, but the engine will not read its movements. The only way to make them move is parenting them to "normal bones" or "deformation bones" and they will follow its parents movements/rotations. About the actual zebu rig in this thread: - Not enough bones for decent animation. - The mesh is symmetrical, but the armature is not. - Envelope weighting is not suitalbe for accurate deformation. It needs vertex groups for each bone in order to have better control over deformations. - Inverse Kinematics for the legs and tail would make animations much more real and easier to do.

Texture WIP

That's some nice texturing work. I agree with Michael here. Leaving such a big part of the model to playercolor will break the color composition depending on the player. It's better to have full control over the main colors of the model/civilization. There's a very nice tutorial about colors in general and composition from blenderguru Here. Very recommended:

As promised here is the blend template with a basic IK rig. Just animate in a new "action" in action editor, and export! Here's a small video showcasing how the armature works (pretty basic and straightforward). For more information on how to export animations to 0AD go to this tutorial For anyone interested, the solution to get the armature working was to export the original MAX armature to SMD, and then import back to blender with an Import SMD addon. Biped animation template.zip

I just want to let everybody know that thanks to Stanislas69 and Hephaestion we finally have a working armature in blender compatible with the current unit meshes. Thank you guys! I'll be posting soon a blend file with a basic IK rig for everyone who wants to make new animations.

Bireme resized. Textures finished! just a bunch of props left. Commiting soon..

In my opinion PBR is not very suitable for a RTS (in 0AD's case at least because the whole shading system would need to be rewritten too) where you play with a zoomed out camera and mostly small objects. It makes sense for FPS or 3rd person shooters where the point of view is much closer to objects and there's room for more detail in assets. You'll also need to create additional maps for each single texture (albedo map, cavity map, reflectivity map... etc) in order to the shader to work properly and show it as nice as the screenshots in the links you added. All this without mentioning the computer resources it would need to run. 0AD has room to improve with additions like atmospheric scattering, overall lighting improvements, proper horizon/sky, options to increase/decrease shadow resolution, and *hopefully* deferred lighting which would make possible things like moving cloud shadows, infinite lighting sources (torches, flaming arrows, fire emmiting light), wheather changes, day/night cycle... well, dreaming is free right?

Trireme texture almost done. I'll tweak the bireme proportions next.

Bireme texture is almost ready:

Ya sean catalanes, vascos, maños, venezolanos o mejicanos son todos bienvenidos aquí

Hey Strannik, I think this one looks really good. When you're happy with the animations, you can post the daes here to commit them to the game

You have specific feedback on what is wrong with it in post #23... I'll wait for Amish to reply and finish this if he hasn't already...

Hey Amish, how is this going? Or Stan, are you going to fix the texture?

I think there's no need to do so, I just changed the title to avoid creating a new thread, but your's already created. By the way, are you going to finish it?

I changed the title, will continue here posting Bireme and Trireme progress. The models are almost finished. All textures are placeholders at the moment. References: http://www.navistory.com/media/divers/antiques/pentere_lagide.gif http://www.navistory.com/media/divers/antiques/hoctere_lagide.gif

Will this be a fullscreen menu or a pop-up menu? I think it would be useful to have the chatbox visible when choosing faction.

Lol, not angry at all, just clarifiying the goal that we were pursuing. I arrived to the same conclusion. During my tests I concluded that the orientation of the bones (called "roll" in blender) is messed up during the export/import process. The weird thing is that manual tweak of the roll sometimes didn't make any changes when exported, and sometimes minimal changes were visible.

Well, the point of this thread was to get the armature working without changing the skeleton .xml because if we change it, we lose all the old animations. The "animation pipeline" per-se is working, I recently animated asian elephants and a tiger, but I created a new armature and skeleton .xml from scratch, so "new" animations are working. What we were trying to achieve here is getting somehow an armature in blender compatible with the current one, so we can keep creating new animations without having to change anything that is already working in-game. Anyway it's more likely that we make new unit meshes with new armature and animations and provide the blend-files in a repo for everyone that wants to make animations.

Care to explain what did you do to get it working? did you only exported the animation from a blendfile? What do you mean that the rest of the animations aren't working?

Whoops missed this post. Yes, I managed to use it, I was defining the material to use "hardcoded" spec intensity instead of specmap which made the material crazy Once corrected, the selfillumination works nicely

If you want some suggestions about the texture, -As I said in post #17 in this thread, the sail is always propped to the ship, so you can have more room for the actual ship texture. (They use different texture files) -Texture size you posted is not squared (it is 1165x1028), the game do not allow texture resolutions that aren't powers of 2 (256x256, 512x512, 1024x512, 256x1024 ....) -Small/Medium boats use 256x256 or 512x512 textures, I guess you aimed here for a 1024x1024, wich is good, just scale down and done, but the fact that the props texture (Barrels and crates) has such small texture space, it will make the props look very low-res compared with the deck/hull when scaled down. - Red stripes on the cloth should be transparent if you were aiming for playercolor. The last section on this post explains very well how playercolor works: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=18340&p=286095 - Texture distribution could be better, things like the yellow flower of the tail don't need such a big portion of the texture if there isn't any detail on it (plain color) Which btw I think playercolor there would look cool Also the row could be rotated so it's perpendicular to the bottom and not placed in diagonal, which eats a lot of unnecessary space. Not a big fan of the wood texture in the head and tail, but that's personal preference. I hope this do not sound too harsh, they're just points for you to improve.

Lol Michael xD Didn't find a bigger one?

I think its looking better now...

Yeah, I'm not very happy with them... I followed the reference but they do not blend with the rest of the ship. Any references with this kind of ship-towers are welcome. Trying to make a generic one, most of the references I found (and the current in-game version) have squared netting.