===[TASK]=== Cobra

[Micket]

http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/2003

A quick texture based on:

cobra.zip

[Unarmed]

A quick texture based on:

http://www.flickr.co...in/photostream/

http://www.flickr.co...in/photostream/

http://www.flickr.co...in/photostream/

Man, Micket. You are a great contributor.

Not to pressure you into anything, but I've made a list of large and some medium mammals that live in the area of the factions in 0 A.D. I think the most common ones are the most important as you'll see. NOTE: none of the mammals I listed are in the other official list!

So if you want to contribute more, I have a list what animals would be the best to make. Later I will do medium mammals and birds, but medium animals are more secrative so you don't see them often (at home I see Roe deers often, hares sometimes, but I never see foxes or badgers).

I also have some suggestions for the parrot and vulture which species should be used. See this thread:

http://www.wildfireg...showtopic=16224

I hope to become the Micket of flora (plants, trees and mushrooms) someday. Today I will start practicing with Blender.

Keep up the great work Micket!

Edited June 23, 2013 by Unarmed

[Micket]

I really don't think we need to add more animals to the list. There is still a huge amount of work left animating the ones I've made so far.

[Unarmed]

I really don't think we need to add more animals to the list. There is still a huge amount of work left animating the ones I've made so far.

Yes that's true. Note that it doesn't have to be done immediatly, it can be done much later.

There are some unimportant on the official list, like the gorilla you made. As gorillas live in a very specific place in Congo forests, none of the biomes we currently have would have gorillas and no factions would live near gorillas. It's still nice to have though, I'm not complaining for having them.

The ones I listed are those that would be in the current biomes and that factions would most certainly come in contact with.

And some excisting animals could be made into placeholders. I would like to make a chital deer and fallow deer skin for the current deer, and perhaps the female lion could have a leopard skin as a placeholder for a leopard.

[frenchiveruti]

Nice designs!

[Strannik]

Salute.

Another great model by Micket. The only thing I changed: applied location on the armature.

Walk animation (sounds weird):

This is work in progress. There are some problems but I think it's better then other cobra walk animations I've made. I'll choose the best animations for death, attack, and idle and will try to make preview tomorrow.

Any suggestions are much appreciated.

[Enrique]

That's a good looking animation Strannik!

May I ask you how you animated it? used spline bones or something?

Looking forward to the rest of the animation set

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Don't cobras fold the fan shaped skin close to their body when moving? I don't think they look like that when they are on the ground?

[Strannik]

Salute.

Thanks, Enrique. I created starting pose then movement for the main bone. Used graph editor to make a wave movement for the rest of the body.

WhiteTreePaladin. You are right. But this armature don't have bones to fold it. I'm not sure how hard it'll be to add this.

Death preview is ready:

[Rahman 540]

how about this development?

[Lion.Kanzen]

20 minutes ago, Rahman 540 said:

how about this development?

As you see, the last developenmt was... June 2014.

[Rahman 540]

are it in high poly?

[Lion.Kanzen]

4 minutes ago, Rahman 540 said:

are it in high poly?

I don't know, @stanislas69 @niektb you know more about this... Than me.

 

they may be can give to you an answer.

[Stan`]

I'd say it's pretty low poly. Around 300 tris maybe.

[Strannik]

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. My most sincere apologies for keeping you waiting for eternity.
Thanks to stanislas69 I can resume making animations for cobra.
Old animations are quite bad so I decided to make new ones. A new test skeleton has 38 bones (added 8 bones for hood animations).

An example animation of the hood:

Spoiler

Does it justify increase in number of bones? Should I use this test skeleton or return to the original one?

A new walk animation:

Spoiler

A picture of the new walk animation without hood animation (for comparison):

Spoiler

Changes from the old walk cycle:
+ new path with more turns looks better (in my opinion);
+ almost no sliding;
+ movement forward is even;
- new path with increased number of turns combined with symmetrical wave is obvious (though changed head animation helps to some extent).

If anyone can help me with following questions, I would be grateful.
Main bone (the one that moves the whole skeleton) is almost in the middle of the skeleton but located far from origin point. Do I understand it right that with animations (like the one on the left side) clicking near the head in game will select cobra but clicking the rest of the body will not?
If that is right than should I use edit mode to move the mesh with its skeleton so that main bone is closer to the origin point or just move main bone closer to origin point during each animation?
Animation on the left side. Skeleton rest position on the right side. Main bone highlighted in blue.

Spoiler

 

Edited July 14, 2017 by Strannik
Emphasized animation name in bold type.

[feneur]

Selection is defined by a box as far as I know, and not really depending on the model or animation. At least that's the case for buildings, I'm not sure if it differs with units/animals.

[Enrique]

Hey @Strannik ! Lovely animations! and glad to see you back!

Visual actors (models) are out of the equation of selection boxes, so they doesn't interfere at all. However, the origin point does. Imagine a small circle decal of the "selected" stuff will always be around the origin point, and the unit/actor will rotate with that origin as a pivot. 

Resuming: in this case, the selection ring would be around the origin point, which would leave half of the snake out of the circle. It doesn't really matter where the root bone is, as long as you have in mind that the origin point would be the "center" of the selection ring.

There should be a workaround to offset the animation towards the origin so it can be more centered, but can't think of it now other than going through all frames manually.

Such good work on the animation man. Looking really detailed, too bad we don't have a FPS mode lol. Keep it up!

[WhiteTreePaladin]

20 hours ago, Strannik said:

Does it justify increase in number of bones? Should I use this test skeleton or return to the original one?

Based on how good it looks, I think it's worth it. I don't think we'll have that many cobras on a single map for it to be an issue anyway. The peacock has a similar animation with its tail feathers.

The new animations look great.

[Strannik]

Thanks for answers and kind words, everyone. More animations.

Attack animation:

 

[/img]

- Rather long (3 seconds). Actual attack happens around 51st frame.
- A half of the body is immobile during the animation. I tried to add subtle movements to it but it looked bad.

Idle_01 animation (a video file because of its length, let me know if it doesn't work):

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-InSrH7Zvm_bE9ocW9sYzhMOFk

- As I mentioned above, this one is quite long.

Death animation:

 

[/img]

- Probably it won't be noticeable in the game. I'm not sure about this death animation. To be honest I don't have any good ideas for it.

Do we need run animation? It will look like a faster version of walk maybe with a more suitable head movement.
It would be great to get at least 2 animations for attack, idle, and death. I'm going to try another idle animation with a different resting pose.
Feel free to leave your feedback or ideas.

Edited July 14, 2017 by Strannik
Emphasized animation name in bold type.

[Strannik]

A small information update.

I was experimenting with different ideas for animations. And from results of those experiments I chose four that looked promising.
The work progresses slowly. Idle02 is almost ready (needs several fixes). Idle03 is about 1/3 ready (I can hardly reuse any parts from other animations, ergo this one takes significantly more time than idle02). Because of time required for idles two death animations didn't receive much attention, apart from several iterations.

What's next? I'll try to fix remaining issues with idle02 and post a preview during a weekend.

[Stan`]

Hey @Strannik nice to be hearing from you

I was wondering if at some point you could video record your animating process and put it on YouTube. No need to comment or anything. Just plain video

[Strannik]

Stanislas69. Yeah, I have not posted updates in a long period of time. But there was not much to show except for ugly experiments I was making. The progress was moving at a pace slower than that of a snail (busy spring didn't help much). In retrospect, I should have posted that I am working on it (but I had no idea how long it will take) or rather that I would inform in case of being unable to continue working on this anymore. Well, learning from mistakes (again).

As I am done testing everything I wanted to test, all available time will be spent on those four animations mentioned in my previous post. If everything goes well a preview for idle02 will be ready during this weekend. Should I fail to get time for idle02 there will be enough time for it next Friday when I shall get a day off. Also I shall get some more time in July (I will be able to finally catch up with a snail, hurrah!).

Off-topic. To be honest, I have never thought about making videos. I suppose the only thing people can learn from my animation process is how animations should not be made (still valuable though :P). Jokes aside, I am not sure how useful such videos may be. The video probably will be like: insert keyframe => move this => adjust that =>insert keyframe... There are a lot of tutorials that actually show and explain what is going on. So I am rather sceptical. But let us not derail this tread too much.

[Stan`]

@Strannik Yeah. I get what you mean but sometimes you can pick new stuff you thought was not possible in blender so it's always nice to watch. So I can't speak for anyone else but I'd like to see how you do it

Also when you have an anim done it would bbecool to attach the blendfiles so if or when you to leqve there would still be a trace of what you've done

Anyway thanks for the good work and not giving up

Edited June 24, 2017 by stanislas69
Rip english

[Strannik]

Idle_02 (video file):

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-InSrH7Zvm_VFJ1VE5DbFZWclk

This one uses parts of the idle_01. Probably it does not differ much from idle_01 to warrant it a place in the pack. Idle_03 will allow to make an animation most suitable for the third slot (a mix of 1 and 3 with a different idle pose). More options for developers to choose from, I suppose. I should warn about an issue with this kind of idle animations. Its size. For example baked idle_01 is approximately 1.8 MB.

stanislas69, I will upload the file. If I understood you correctly and that is what you asked for.

Off-topic.

 

I ought to finish this and I am not going to give up. Sorry if my previous comment sounded as I am about to give up, it was not my intention. I just wanted to explain that slow process is to be expected.

I need to think about videos . Can't say much else at the moment.

Last but not least. Thanks for support.

 

Edited June 30, 2017 by Strannik

[GunChleoc]

Uploading the files once in a while also has the added benefit of providing another backup of your work - just in case