Is animating still a thing?

[k4far]

I am recently playing with animations. It seems like there aren't many people doing it.

 

I have been using Softimage Tool 7.5 following tutorial from 2003 by Alex Ball with minilogoguy18's rig. Everytime I run the program it informs me there is an update but isn't Mod Tool like discontinued. Is it safe to update?

 

Would you mind telling me more about editing/removing keyframes. I seem to have a problem to redo one of the frames that I find not good enough. Also some slider stamps marking there is a frame became invisible - can still normally play my animation. I would like to understand how that works. Is it possible some of the rig bones are hidden because my rig differs from one in the video and there is 'hidden' tab in explorer - not sure I understand how to enable these elements. Special question, it's a mystery to me... Are JKA animations and animations used in Movie Battles 2 different, can they be imported from one to the other?

 

[Circa]

@@minilogoguy18 is the mastermind you're looking for.

[minilogoguy18]

The rig differs some from the one in the video mainly because it was being constantly updated and improved on.

You can update the software but honestly, there is something I'd like to check before you do, see if the File>Export>Model is greyed out or not, if it isn't, then DON'T update, if so then might as well. Nothing to really do with JA but something that could be useful on getting this into commercial versions without me having to rebuild it.

 

MB2 animations are the same, whoever is doing them may be using another software which it is possible to do this in Blender and Max but there is just no tutorials or specialized rig to speed up the process afaik. As far as importing goes, the only program that can import GLA files is Blender, you'll only get a handful of null objects (someone correct me if I'm wrong) or possibly straight bones which either wont be too useful. This animation rig is a "shadow rig" which essentially takes a rig that wouldn't work in the game engine that offers way more control and has the game skeleton constrained to it so that the game skeleton "follows" the motion of the rig. These motions are then plotted on export, no parts of the rig are in the game skeletons hierarchy or get exported to the game.

 

Another thing to be aware of, JA doesn't use all of those finger digits so you'll be limited to how you can pose the hands. The index finger is controlled by it's bones but the middle, ring and pinky fingers are all controlled by the bones that would move the ring finger. In JK2 they have all the finger joints but not JA.

 

There is an updated video on this rig showing what's been changed, you should probably also turn off constraint compensation. It'd probably take a lot to go over just how to animate with the program, that wasn't really the main focus of my tutorial videos, there are already so many generic Softimage videos out there. It was mainly just to show how to take a completed animation and get it working in the game since for the longest time very few people understood how.