Animation Pipeline

[Wijitmaker]

Can anybody else answer the above question? How do I attach a child object to a parent objects, so that when I move the parent - the child will follow.

Perhaps point me to a good tutorial?

I think a template for blender humanoid animation is almost there! Just need a few more tweaks.

[feneur]

To attach I believe it's just to select them both and press Ctrl+P, but I forget in which order you select them (e.g. if it's the one you select first or last that becomes the parent), so I guess it's best for someone else to explain it better (Unless it's something other than just parenting one object to another you are thinking about In which case my advice is probably completely useless =) )

[WhiteTreePaladin]

You can parent multiple objects at the same time. The last one selected should become the parent. Ctrl+p sounds correct.

[Pureon]

You might also find the 'Bone' tab useful. Select individual bones in Edit Mode and assign their parent bone using this:

[Wijitmaker]

Excellent thanks, I'll give this a shot when I get home.

[Wijitmaker]

Thanks for the tip guys, I think we have template!

Does someone want to try animating this with something more usable/practical, and we can do an export to see if we can get it applied to the standard skeleton?

dude_4.zip

[Gen.Kenobi]

No IK/FK? darn. It'll make it harder to animate. Almost like OldSchool :/

[Wijitmaker]

If it was 3ds max, I could set up IK/FK in 10 minutes. But, this is the best I can do in blender, I can barely navigate the UI. There has to be some tutorials on how to add IK/FK on youtube. It would be nice if a blender user took the iniative to apply it to this rig if it is needed (and I agree, it would be nice - I use it a lot in Max).

[Gen.Kenobi]

I don't have the time to add it right now, but if you wish to try and learn some Blender , here you go:

This is about the Leg, there are other about arms and others, but if you learn one, I think you'll be good to replicate

[Enrique]

If it was 3ds max, I could set up IK/FK in 10 minutes. But, this is the best I can do in blender, I can barely navigate the UI. There has to be some tutorials on how to add IK/FK on youtube. It would be nice if a blender user took the iniative to apply it to this rig if it is needed (and I agree, it would be nice - I use it a lot in Max).

I started playing around with the armature. I plan to add an IK/FK setup, but I'll probably have to add some bones. Is it possible? or this is the maximum number of bones allowed? I have no knowledge of how the armatures are handled by the game.

[Wijitmaker]

I think you can add bones and it will still be able to be used and shared as common between all existing humanoid animations and models. I think you may run into issues though if you try to delete or modify (lengths, positions, orientation, or relationships) the existing bones. Any new bones added for IK purposes would simply be ignored by not calling them out in the skeleton.xml file.

[Enrique]

Simple IK/FK rig done. I could go a little further with the setup, depending on animators needs, but it may be "incompatible". If this setup is not "breaking" anything I might try to make an advanced/faster-working setup

When you select an IK bone (hand or foot) at the bottom of the right viewport panel (open/close with "N") you can see a property slider (red square on the screenshot). At value=1 uses IK, and value=0 switches to FK.

Edit: Forgot to attach the file! ^^

dude_4_IK.zip

[Wijitmaker]

Great, I guess it is now ready to try and do a .dae export test? Anybody up for that? I'll unfortunately be going on vacation and returning next week.

[Shield Bearer]

Whats the procedure for getting this into the game? I could try it

[Wijitmaker]

I think you simply export the .dae and then you have to marry up the bones as they are described in blender with how they are described in the skeleton.xml file.

Check out what we were doing earlier in this thread

Zaggy has been setting these up for animals out of blender, so I bet he is pretty savy with the process by now.

It really isn't documented very well, so if you give it a shot, take some notes on how you did it so we can get that up on the wiki.

[Enrique]

I think you simply export the .dae and then you have to marry up the bones as they are described in blender with how they are described in the skeleton.xml file.

Check out what we were doing earlier in this thread

Zaggy has been setting these up for animals out of blender, so I bet he is pretty savy with the process by now.

It really isn't documented very well, so if you give it a shot, take some notes on how you did it so we can get that up on the wiki.

Please excuse my ignorance on this matter, I tried to follow the conversation on this thread but I got lost quickly

I made a crappy "battle-charge" run cycle in blender for testing. Now, the next step is to export in collada format and mess around with an xml file that should look as kenobi's code you pointed in your link?

Another question:

Since the IK setup only registers "IK-special-bone" frames that moves the arms and legs and they are ignored by the game, that means that a keyframe for all bones is needed on every frame in order to "register" the animation when exported?

I attach the file animation if someone else wants to try to export it/play with it.

dude_4_IK_charge anim.zip

[Wijitmaker]

Since the IK setup only registers "IK-special-bone" frames that moves the arms and legs and they are ignored by the game, that means that a keyframe for all bones is needed on every frame in order to "register" the animation when exported?

Yeah, I think when the .dae is exported it "flattens" the animation and automatically applies a position and rotation to each bone on each frame. I think... I'm not 100% sure on that. So I think you should be OK for exporting this.

Please excuse my ignorance on this matter, I tried to follow the conversation on this thread but I got lost quickly

Yeah, sorry about that - it is kind of confusing and it hasn't been explained very well. I'll take a look at this file when I get back in 2 weeks if nobody else has.

Nice work - thanks for the work on the IK setup!

[historic_bruno]

Yeah, I think when the .dae is exported it "flattens" the animation and automatically applies a position and rotation to each bone on each frame. I think... I'm not 100% sure on that. So I think you should be OK for exporting this.

I don't know how the this setup compares with rigify / autorigging, but in that case you have to "bake" the animation before exporting.

[Gen.Kenobi]

Awesome!

I'll have to try this!

[Gen.Kenobi]

I did a quickly dance anim to try this new Rig. It's really imperfect, BUT, maybe someone can import it to see if it works.

dude_fun_80frames_anim_test.zip

[Zaggy1024]

I did a quickly dance anim to try this new Rig. It's really imperfect, BUT, maybe someone can import it to see if it works.

dude_fun_80frames_anim_test.zip

I tried putting it in the engine, but it said that it had too many objects to convert... I looked in the DAE and it seems like the only things in it other than the armature and mesh are a light and "VisualSceneNode". I tried removing those, but it didn't fix it.

[Enrique]

I tried putting it in the engine, but it said that it had too many objects to convert... I looked in the DAE and it seems like the only things in it other than the armature and mesh are a light and "VisualSceneNode". I tried removing those, but it didn't fix it.

Could you please try with my test animation on the previous page?

Or give me some headlines to import it myself into the game please .

[Spahbod]

I tried that one too, and it didn't work either. To figure out why the I can't get it in the engine, I think someone will have to change the engine's error messages so that it'll say what the error is more clearly. The error I'm currently getting ("Found too many possible objects to convert") needs say what's actually causing it to say that (perhaps a list of the possible objects?). There are some other errors that are rather unclear too.

I have encountered this error before. How many meshes are you exporting? The exporter only supports one mesh per file. I used export selected. That may help.

[Zaggy1024]

Could you please try with my test animation on the previous page?

Or give me some headlines to import it myself into the game please .

I tried it and it said it caught an exception while loading it. :\

To explain how to export it would probably require you to come on IRC. It usually takes me a bit of troubleshooting to actually get the game to load my animations properly.

[historic_bruno]

I tried putting it in the engine, but it said that it had too many objects to convert... I looked in the DAE and it seems like the only things in it other than the armature and mesh are a light and "VisualSceneNode". I tried removing those, but it didn't fix it.

There are multiple geometries/meshes in library_geometries. AFAIK the engine only supports one per model.