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===[TASK]=== Oryx (Beisa)


Micket
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Hi Enrique,

I am more than willing to dive into animating for you guys. My prime interest is animation so that would be the best place for me to start out! If you guys need me to do anything else down the road I could also lend a hand elsewhere.

My only concern is I use a Student Version of Maya.

kosmo, I took a look at Inkscape, and while I am not as familiar with it as I am with Flash, I was able to open svg's in Illustrator and then save them as an swf. So far I have only been able to come up with two possible solutions that could help. One is to export a png sequence and bring that into Flash (although this may cause problems with scaling since both programs are vector based and a png sequence would lose that). Second would be to export each frame as an svg, open them Illustrator, save as swf, then place the frames in Flash (on second thought that may be a long roundabout way of doing things). Another possibility I was able to find after some searching was there are some websites that say they can convert svg's to swf's, although I'm not too sure how they work or handle animated sequences. I'll let you know if I figure out a better way.

This all sounds so exciting. Thank you for this opportunity.

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My only concern is I use a Student Version of Maya.

What does that mean? Do you have any restrictions with the software? The main 3D tool in the team is currently Blender3D, but we have some members that use 3DMax, not sure if we can help a lot with Maya, but we'll try.

Also, for starters I recommend you make a quick read to the Art design document HERE. There are some things outdated, but you can find some information regarding how animation works in the engine as well as Maya plugins for collada (.dae format used in 0AD) and other tips that could be helpful to read.

I'm going to leave you here with the last version of the Oryx model. It's modeled by contributor Micket some days ago and textured by me. I've removed the armature that Micket made to avoid importing errors with the armature so you can create a new rig to fit your animating needs. I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to help you a lot in the animation area, but I'll do my best. Hopefully if you have any hard questions our team animator Zaggy1024 can assist you. (Zip contains .dae and .obj model format and texture)

oryx.zip

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Student version basically means I don't own a commercial version of the program. "legally forbid from using the software for monetary gain" , I figure since this is just a thing thats open source and all that its not a problem, but I've never been on a big project like this before so I am not familiar with these sorts of things.

I was looking over the guide and I was unable to find the ColladaMaya plugin download. Each time I click on the download it brings me to http://www.fortem.com/ and then I get lost. My only other question would be the joint/bone count of the model. The standard for a human model is at 25, however for the oryx im at about 32, additional joints were added for ears and the tail.

I attached a screen shot, I was wondering if you could tell me how the other rigs looked? Are they simple Iks? ikfk blends, reverse foot rigs, spline iks. I was also wondering if I would be able to use blend shapes to do some of the animating, breathing mostly.

I think I'm over-thinking things but any input would be appreciated.

post-15448-0-65337100-1371784823_thumb.p

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Hello!

The rig is looking nice so far. As far as I know, you can use fk-ik as you like. I think the only limitation is that bone scaling do not work for animation (not sure if you meant that with blend shapes)

If I remember correctly, the animations need to be baked (record every bone position for each frame) because fk-ik targets are not taken into account when exporting into the game.

But I'm afraid we cannot use it :'(

I was taking a look about the license issue and found this: (see post #9) http://www.worldofle...ercial-UDK-game

Have you ever worked with Blender3D? the UI may seem intimidating at first, but animating is exatcly the same (go to frame X, pose the armature, select bones, insert keyframe, repeat)

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Alright, thanks for explaining the licensing issues. I havent taken a look at Blender3D, but I would be more than willing to take a shot at learning it.

Silver lining on this issue is I do have a commercial license for some Adobe programs (photoshop, etc) so there is no worry there.

Should I continue to post progress from the oryx model when working in Blender or should I make a new thread for this?

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Hello everyone!

Sorry I have not been in contact recently. But I have taken a few jabs at Blender and I think I have a pretty decent understanding of it now. In addition I was able to rig the Oryx model. Hopefully by this weekend I should have a few of the animations set up.

post-15448-0-54455200-1372406661_thumb.p

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  • 2 weeks later...

Ok, Blender animation was a lot harder than I expected. But I have the first walk cycle test for the Oryx.

As one friend noted, the headbob is a little too extreme (as if he was listening to some amazing beats), so I'll be sure to lessen the extremes. After I smooth out the rest of the hoof work and the front legs, I'll start to work on the tail.

I also noticed that the renderer has the smoothing on this higher than what the viewfinder shows. Anyone know why this happens? I'll look around to see if anyone has had a similar question.

post-15448-0-88933800-1373526622_thumb.g

Edited by Egg
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Ok, Blender animation was a lot harder than I expected. But I have the first walk cycle test for the Oryx.

As one friend noted, the headbob is a little too extreme (as if he was listening to some amazing beats), so I'll be sure to lessen the extremes. After I smooth out the rest of the hoof work and the front legs, I'll start to work on the tail.

I also noticed that the renderer has the smoothing on this higher than what the viewfinder shows. Anyone know why this happens? I'll look around to see if anyone has had a similar question.

Gotta say this looks pretty great. The head bob is a little extreme, but not too bad.
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Looks great! Very fluid and organic. One concern (besides the head banging) is the chest. Right now the muscles between the forelegs is static, but in actuality that muscle should be pulled toward the forward moving foot, though I don't know if you can do that with the current skeleton setup :)

I also noticed that the renderer has the smoothing on this higher than what the viewfinder shows. Anyone know why this happens? I'll look around to see if anyone has had a similar question.

You've probably got 'Subsurf' on in the modifiers tab :)

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I think that looks really good for your first Blender animation. The headbob is a little extreme - if it happened once every 10 steps or so it would be fine (it's quite common to see animals do that).

Have you looked into how 0 A.D. works with animations? If you're interested, you could take a quick look through the source files and wiki documentation. The Basic 3D Implementation tutorial is a good place to start to get your head around the file structure.

There's an animation tutorial here, but it's incomplete. You could however import an existing collada animation file that was created in Blender, such as this zebra walk animation. Blender's collada importer won't import the armature properly (some of the bone scaling may be wrong etc.) however you should at least be able to see the skeleton structure that was used. 0 A.D. uses skeleton definition files to allow different models to use the same animation - See the xml skeleton definition files here that define bone names and hierarchy. It might be quite confusing to understand at first, and i don't want to get into too much detail now, but I think it's worth noting.

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Right now the muscles between the forelegs is static, but in actuality that muscle should be pulled toward the forward moving foot, though I don't know if you can do that with the current skeleton setup

Im not sure what part you are trying to address, are you talking about the bones by the "collar" and hips?

I'm trying to make sense of some of the files you've shown me but I cant make too much sense of them. Most of the files look like Im looking at a webpage view source (is that normal?). Im using a mac so I dont know if thats a cause for the confusion.

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Indeed, the animations look nice.

A bit off topic but I've seen these animals recently - I think they are also called "springbock" in English.

Would be nice to have them animated (probably people could think the animations look unnatural though).

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  • 2 weeks later...

Oryxanimations.zip

Indeed, the animations look nice.

A bit off topic but I've seen these animals recently - I think they are also called "springbock" in English.

Would be nice to have them animated (probably people could think the animations look unnatural though).

That video is awesome. I think I should give it a go.

Here are the blender files for the oryx run and walk. My time has been a little taxed via job and moving. But I've been dedicating time over the weekends.

-Says I'm not allowed to upload the blender file. But I compressed them in a .zip. Let me know how these work!

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That video is awesome. I think I should give it a go.

I think it could be very difficult to make it look natural and after thinking about it a bit more I'm not sure it's going to work even if you make the animations perfect.

If you like to try it, that would certainly be interesting but don't do it just because I suggested that ;).

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