Wijitmaker

hehe, yeah nice video.

Awesome, they all look good now except for the idle. There is something funky going on with the front right leg. It looks like the leg is being pulled off the ground and snapping back to it's original position. Have a look there. We are getting Bobbo and Michael to get that apple tree task created for you. You have chosen 3 distinct tasks with different focuses... modeling with the roman alternative structures, animation with the deer, and now transparent mapping with the apple tree. It is good to push yourself like that an not be comfortable with one skill.

We have uploaded a file to your folder that you can use as an example of how we created the other Persian structures. Feel free to pillage anything you like from that model - in fact, we would encourage you to do that rather than spend time redoing work.

Alrighty, and apple tree it is.

Arg.. I'm sorry I worked a 12 hour day today and didn't get home till 8. I lost my 0ad time. I will be able to review tomorrow. What task do you have your eye on next so we can prepare it in advance?

Ok, great. Use that import/export bip tool, it should speed things up for you to recreate those animations.

Unfortunately I'm out of town on a business trip, so I won't be able to give you feedback till Saturday when I'm scheduled to be at the EWU campus.

I looked over the animations, great improvements Walk - The walk still looks a bit off. It looks like it is 'trudging' through mud/snow. I would try to make the deer step more lightly/daintily. Maybe that would be making the legs not spread so far apart in animation, perhaps raising the hooves a bit more in motion. Also the back seems very flat during the animation. The animal's weight would shift based on what hooves are on the ground at what time... Should sway a bit, the back can flex a bit in motion too Run - looks great, only thing is I would raise the tail - straight up. Like this: http://www.deer-hunting-success.com/image-...383636small.jpg It stays like that all the time. Idle - better, the feet and hands must stay still though. Death - good to go as is Attack - good to go as is Getting there

Steve, you could add some geometry to the hoof region if you would like. It would probably just be a few cuts you would have to make in poly mode. Pretty easy. I'm out this weekend (in Ellensburg with my in-laws) so I won't be able to look at the files till Monday. Keep the files separated because that is how they will need to be exported. The animations are exported directly from Max. So there isn't much needed to be done after the max file is created and ready to go. They game uses a skeletal animation system, so it retains most all of the animation data. What will happen is... I will export the deer mesh once with the existing skeletal/rigging system you set that should be the same on all. Then I will export each of the animations individually. You could theoretically create animations for the deer without the skin applied at all in Max. But, it helps to have it there to see how the mesh deforms during the animation.

Excellent improvements Here is some more feedback: * Running - much smoother, great! The animation seems to have the deer's body pitched downward during much of the animation and I'm not sure, but I think it would help to make it more erect in this bounding. Also, when deer run in flight their tail is usually standing straight up in warning - sorta like a flag. Animate the hooves (toes, fingers - rotation) to make the legs look a little less stiff - they look sorta peg legish. Watch out for the hooves going through the ground. Frames 2, 3, 4 seem a bit off. * Idle - you got the idea. But keep the feet fixed. I found some typical classic deer poses, try and replicate one of these: http://www.everythingwolf.com/gallery/gall...px?CategoryID=6 (Note how the head is more level) * Walking - much improved, I added the other animation to your files for reference. The front legs look like they are a little ahead of the body in motion and seem to spread out widely. Animate the hooves (toes, fingers - rotation) to make the legs look a little less stiff - they look sorta peg legish. * Death - it is good except the two back legs look like they are doing the exact same thing. Perhaps find a way to make their motion a bit different * Attack - looks much better. It is a little quick between frames 14, 15, 16, try spreading that out over 2 more frames. Note, to smooth out an animation, sometimes it helps to go into Graph Editors => Track View - Curve Editor. This is where you can look at the curves of your animation of the bones and look at the smoothness of the curves on the transform parameters. Sometimes it helps to use that to find abnormal spikes and smooth out the animation. I think you are getting the hang of this - well done

I uploaded a reference file for you - check it out.

Well, they all need to be reworked - except possibly the death. Walk - the folder was empty except from some strange file extension I didn't recognize Run - good in purpose but it overall isn't very smooth motion, the back is ridged and it looks very mechanical. I took a crude photo (camera phone) from a book I found at the bookstore. Idle - Michael is right - this is way to much motion. Typically in an idle animation we only have subtile shifting of weight, maybe an every so slight movment of the head. If it was a horse I'd have it shift it's weight a touch, and make the tail swish back and forth. Deer are very very still when idle, so I wouldn't think you would do much of anything except maybe twitch an ear or blink. So since you can't do either, just give it an alert pose. We can randomly sequence it with other idle animations like it grazing with it's head down (start and stop with head down). attack - pretty good, just watch out for your feet penetrating the ground, try to smooth the animaiton out and make it less jerky death - it works for what it is, I'll be giving you a sample file that could possibly improve it a bit, but it happens so fast, and it doesn't loop... so it isn't a super critical animation. I'm going to add a file to your folder that is some motions taken from another game (BFME). They should help you with some timing. You could pretty much copy them exactly by watching the angles between joints. A few hints with animation: * Once you have a good start pose, copy the pose and paste it at both ends of the animation (with key framing turned on) * Start with animating the core of the body and move outward to the limbs. It is easier to do that than the other way around * Less keyframes is more. Somtimes you find yourself fighting a jumpy animation and you relize it is a bad key from a few frames ago. CS has a great parabolic motion tool built into it that will smooth your animation for you. It also has good tools to create a point where the hands and feet are fixed, or they slide, or are free. Another favorite feature of CS is the copy and pasting of poses, animation, and joints - mirroring them is useful too. I'm not sure how much of this you learned in class, but it is useful. Ask Brian for some of the videos he probably already showed the other students about CS. * The animation should play in 3dsmax at the same speed it would in real life I honestly suck at animation... most of what I have done is copied from books, or from other game animations, or from motion capture files. The thing about animation is that when we see it we immediately compare it to real life experiences with what it should look like. Most of the time it doesn't measure up. Animal locomotion is very tricky too because we can't 'act it out' for ourselves in front of a mirror. There has been many studies, and here is one that might help too: Thankyou for Google! http://books.google.com/books?id=uVbrtU0rCVsC Click on preview of the book and you can view the entire thing. I think the deer starts on page 142.

lol, nice *slaps knee*

Steve... we have some improvements to make. You have done an amazing job considering you haven't taken a class on CS before, but you need some better references. Let me see what I can scrounge up for you.

Note in the picture though how the deers 'clavicles' are drawn back though, yet the legs remain straight. The back is slightly sloped downward. If you make those changes, the model just might work as is? Sorry Steve, I haven't gotten a chance to give you a good complete review of the animations yet. I'm hoping to this weekend. I'm glad the reference helped. I wish I had more. There must be books out there - that would have more sketches of this. If you find a good one on Amazon I think Brian could purchase it for the class? Or let me know what the book is, I'll buy it and scan the pages you want.

Hmm, Michael has a good point, but it would be nice to have grazing be a part of the idle animation. I wonder if we might need 2 more animations... One animation of the deer stationary grazing (start and stop with head down), and another walking very slowly with head down grazing. It might take some tricky AI to splice the animation sequences together correctly though. I'll see if I can get Matei's input.

Well, I looked at the videos briefly last night. It is a good start. One of the things I noticed was that the run wasn't really a deer running motion, it sort of looked like a horse. Deer/Gazelle/Antelope 'bound' rather than gallop. I'm trying to find some references for you. YouTube is a good place to start. This is the best I can do on my lunch break

This is a bit of an oddity in CS, I don't know why they do this, but you have to specify exactly what kind of a movement you want when you move the Biped center of gravity (that ball thing in the pelvis). See this image: Where that last arrow on the bottom is pointed. You toggle between those 3 options: I don't think it is very intuitive, but it must have been done for a reason... ask Brian Note - don't have that biped character depressed like that first image has - that would modify your default biped structure which you don't want to do, that shouldn't be blue when you click those three options.

Quite the mystery, but I think I solved it (I hope) What I ended up doing was to use the clavical for the upper shoulder region so now the deer walks on it's feet. I think Michael is right, horses and elephants walk on their toes. I'm not sure the deer do to the extent of the horse. See here: http://www.oricomtech.com/projects/leg-anat.htm So, I reversed the direction of the arm movement, and made the hoof the hand rather than a finger. Also I changed the biped to "classic", which in my opinion is easier to work with and modify perfectly to meet your needs for a non-human. Note that you can 'edit mesh or poly' on every one of the pieces of the skeleton to modify them how you want. Just be careful to keep the pivot between the joints where you want them, because it is easy to modify the meshes to an extreme and loose representation of the pivot. Go ahead and modify the mesh and the skeleton to your needs for the length of the joints. I froze the deer in transparent, in case you wonder what is going on there. I also left a copy of your deer skeleton there for reference.

Hmm, I'll take a look at the file in your task folder tomorrow. Should be something that could be done.

Sorry, didn't catch that question, if you see it - looking horizontal to it, you can generally leave it. If you start to pitch the camera down and start to look up, you could probably remove many of those polygons. RTS games don't usually offer a FPS type camera view unless there is some sort of special cinematic.

That looks pretty good Steve! Excellent for a first time biped animation! The gif plays kind of fast, so its hard to tell exactly - but one thing I noticed is that the animation for the game needs to start and stop with the same pose so that it can loop. For that reason, you might not want to have the deer actually step forward so much in attack, but perhaps simply lunge. Feel free to upload .avi files to the SVN folder for the task and we can review them there

Steve, I didn't get the building final tweaks done - but I uploaded to SVN what I've been doing. I also have your deer task created for you. I have all day tomorrow (wife doesn't get home till 9) to work on these - Michael and I should get a screenshot for you by the end of the week.

Yeah, this isn't a prop, this is a full fledged building

50 seems really low - I think you would be able to go up to 200 or so for those (what does the art spec say for buildings)?