Flowing robes?

[DT.]

It's a bit more complicated, it seems. It's been a while, sue me.

 

Anyway, I think the best thing you can do is use the odd skeletons as a shadow with your normal skeleton strapped to it, and then bake the animation. Hopefully all of the odd skeletons are identical, so it'll be faster the next time you need to do this.

[ChalklYne]

Yeah thats about the conclusion I came to as well... at frame 19,201 right now, almost through the V's.

 

Take a look at the T's lol. Holy shit.

[DT.]

Does mod tool even have any cloth sim?

[ChalklYne]

@@DT85

 

Yeah Softimage has cloth sim. I was using it earlier today screwing around... im wondering if thats a bad idea though. I think using tails or something would work out better, but I'm honestly just winging it. It'll be easier to keep track of the clothing and stuff and make the first frame end with the same position of the last frame on the anims that need it to. What did you have in mind? I'm also curious about if adding 75 nulls to the existing skeleton all animated will cause performance issues?

[ChalklYne]

Alright theyre done importing.

 

Im at 21,175 right now... but for the missing 201 frames, 70 or so of them are single frame anims which will be added maybe tomorrow... and the few broken ones that make up the remaining 130 frames or so...  will be traced from the source xsi's. Hardest parts done.

 

Ill need a day or so to get the anims all set up correctly and I want to name them all better to match exactly the animations.cfg list so... there'll be a few days of what looks like no progress but it'll just be me cleaning shit up and getting it all sorted. 

[DT.]

Adding 75 nulls to the skeleton? Why so many?

[Archangel35757]

@@DT85

Well... When you import the xsi files they look good... but when you export them as fbx files then import those fbx files as action sources for the animation mixer... the above mentioned anims break

 

EDIT: How would you go about fixing them?

Why can't you save the imported dotXSI files directly as action sources?  Why the export to FBX and re-import?

[Archangel35757]

My thinking about Cloth models... was to modify (if necessary) the openJK code to allow bolting on of MD3 models... where the MD3 models are exported cloth simulations.  Or you could create a separate bone cloth model and bolt it onto the player-- so the bones are not part of the humanoid skeleton... but it would require code changes to synchronize the playing of animations of the humanoid and the cloth objects...

[ChalklYne]

@@Archangel35757 I dont know lol. I tried importing the xsi's as action sources and it just wasnt working for me. At least when I exported as fbx i could tell immediately which anims were breaking. It was a daunting process and believe me when I say I have been trying to approach this 100 different ways before I decided on the workflow i pursued. Im also trying to avoid any code changes to it so I think the old nulls will have to work for this particular project

 

@@DT85 Nevermind I was overworked and underslept. But... there will be 75 new nulls added to the skeleton. You just wont have to have them all on each model. The nulls will have to control the front back and side flaps, capes, togruta tentacles, pony tail, saber and armor jiggle, etc... the thing is though... you wont have them all rigged at once and the ones you dont use will be omitted at compile anyways so it wont cost extra to have them there. You basically will be in charge of how expensive your model is, and we can use one base fbx for all cloth physics. 

 

I was hoping on just getting the anims all built separated named and everything and passing it on to someone else to do the simulations... but the nulls linked to tails seems to be the best option in my experience and i dont mind doing it myself if thats the case. Ill upload the completed fbx without bloth physics and one with the nulls so people can make their own physics or anim sets easily. 

 

The softimage cloth physics look amazing and are easy enough to implement... but in order for them to look well youll need just as much if not more nulls than the tails method. Also, you wont have very good control over the first and end frame of an animation as to where the cloth lands because you need them to appear seamless. So tails n nulls are the best option i can think of and believe me i have racked my brain over this since bloth was first suggested 

 

Does everything make sense and have i overlooked anything? 

[ChalklYne]

Hit frame 3000 of renames and cleanup. 1/7th done of the base anim cleanup. Reason for cleanup is there wont be a recompiling of animations.cfg... it will all have the same frame numbers and frame positioning as the base... just with bloth added

[ChalklYne]

@@DT85 @@Archangel35757

 

 

oh my shit i figured out how to fix the anims so that everything works perfectly its hell and its overwhelming and its just beautiful.

 

all anims now work.

 

give me a while to clean everything up. and by a while i mean renaming and trimming 1700+ anims

 

everything works now. 

 

perseverance. persa-fuckin-verance. 

 

i hate to say a toadasow but u know what boys? a toadasow. a fuckin atoadasow

 

im so pumped. i had a dream you know... but dont let your dreams be dreams

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ChalklYne]

OK so time for a recap.

 

What I will have in the next couple of days is all 21376 animation frames imported into an fbx with separated and correctly named anims in accordance to the base animations.cfg

 

The fbx skeleton is basically a jedi outcast skeleton with all the missing bones (i.e. toe bones) with those extra bones all animated correctly

 

The fbx skeleton has the original base T-pose and the JKA root A-pose (in case anyone wants to use it for models that have been positioned in the T-pose)

 

All "broken" anims are fixed and will be exactly the same as in base, no tracing or approximation

 

If you haven't been following, having all of the animations will make it possible to add bones to the base anims for cloth simulation etc.

 

 

@@minilogoguy18 want to use this to set up a new animation rig for newer versions of Softimage? 

 

If we get this skeleton plus its anims in a nice synoptic rig and rig a kyle to it, it will be everything you need to make a playermodel or make anims all in one scene and will serve as a great reference to people who dont fully understand how to make a custom playermodel... you can just open this up and see what the deal is with a fully completed kyle

[minilogoguy18]

The animation rig I made already has all the missing bones, it's just not that easy to retarget the ones to match the rig controllers due to obvious transform differences. You could manually trace over them but it doesn't seem to be of much help to have all the animations in a editable file since well they're not really needed other than for reference.

 

I did what you're doing once but using the source files since they also have the missing bones, just combined them into 1 file and had a animation mixer track with all the animations stored as clips and named properly but the file was lost at some point.

 

[ChalklYne]

Yeah I always save my stuff on multiple devices its not going anywhere. Sucks you lost it. This ones almost ready to go... then ill start a debate over which cloth nulls to add i.e. capes etc.

[minilogoguy18]

Well I'm not sure what approach you took but it was pretty simple to do, just boring and tedious.

 

I had the skeleton that was to receive the animations stored under a Model and imported the source file 1 at a time under another so that there were no naming conflicts. I also had a conversion table for some things but I'd simply store the fcurves and transfer them via the animation mixer.

[ChalklYne]

Well I'm not sure what approach you took but it was pretty simple to do, just boring and tedious.

 

I had the skeleton that was to receive the animations stored under a Model and imported the source file 1 at a time under another so that there were no naming conflicts. I also had a conversion table for some things but I'd simply store the fcurves and transfer them via the animation mixer.

 

 

It was not simple. By any means. I imported them all separately and constrained a skeleton to them each and created actions from each one. It was hell but it worked out perfectly and at least its done now

[minilogoguy18]

You need to make sure of one thing, the skeleton you used has the proper hierarchy and local transforms for each bone or you'll get some strange problems like ankles rolling the wrong way on slopes and neck rotating on a different axis when looking.

 

I've been wanting to get around to remaking my rig in SI 2015 but lately I've been working harder than an ugly stripper and house shopping.

 

BTW, the synoptic thing isn't very easy, best way is to get the base made in SI but switch over to Adobe Dreamweaver to get the hot spots drawn out in better detail, switching back and forth to check that everything works. Most of the scripting should be done in SI for simplicity but it's ability to draw a detailed hot spot region sucks especially in the small window they give you.

[DT.]

You need to make sure of one thing, the skeleton you used has the proper hierarchy and local transforms for each bone or you'll get some strange problems like ankles rolling the wrong way on slopes and neck rotating on a different axis when looking.

 

^ This.

 

It's due to the pitch/yaw being coded to be on a certain axis. I much prefer Source engines method of having a lot of this coded animation stuff external. An example is allowing it so you can set your own pitch/yaw axis per skeleton.

[ChalklYne]

@@minilogoguy18 Yeah im positive its set up correctly. Good point though. Good luck house shopping

 

i procured the skeleton in a less than noble method... but it is correct thats for sure

[ChalklYne]

Just as an update im at frame 9000 of the cleanups. Theyre going as planned. It's not really that necessary, but itll be worth the time spent.

[Akkarin]

@ChalklYne How is the clean up going?

 

If you find the time, can you elaborate on how the new skeleton will work?