General Grievous model - and coding n animation question

[Langerd]

I was thinking about it for a long time. Grievous is for me one of the best cyborg design ever. I always loved his look and idea of 4 arms. The magic of this character died when they made him a coward that was always running away and made him like jedi killer ... which was not true at all.

 

But i remember him from animated version of clone wars (Tartakovsky's one) where he was amazing. Later i was disappointed.

 

Even so i wanted to play as him in jk3. When i found the player model with 4 arms i was shocked and download the model right away. I didnt pay attention on details and i found out that his arms were completely strected and connected to his two other arms... it looks like they were connected with glue.

 

So i was thinking... when i was looking at the saber droid animations there were some animations for attacks. I would add for Grievous 4-6 animations of attacks... overall i would make animation for 4 arms grievous.

 

So here is my coding question - is there any way to give the grievous 4 sabers that will be activated? I mean when we will add 2 extra tags for his other hands. Would this be possible now with coding? Movie Battles 2 has the tags for the models for the weapons on the model but they are weapons that are switched .

[Langerd]

Like i said. I want to make myself some challange - make animations for General Grievous. Is someone intrestesed with this idea?

[Noodle]

It's a very ambitious and interesting idea, but I have no idea how you could code it to make it work. You could always work on what has been done and imitate part of what the 4 armed grievous model did. It achieved the 4 lightsaber effects by making custom saber hilts that gave the illusion of being 4 instead of 2. Then again, making good animations like that would be quite impossible. 

[AshuraDX]

A first idea would be to try and duplicate the hand tags on a existing model, then move them to another position and see what happens when the model is loaded ingame.

[Tempust85]

Take a look at how sabers are bolted to the player in the code. Code is the easy part - it's the 4-arm skeleton with animations that's the hard part.

[ChalklYne]

@@DT85

I dont know much to anything about other programs... but to help this out in Softimage... what I would do is duplicate the arms skeletons... then animate one of them to do an action, and apply it with a Warp to negative X axis or whatever so you could duplicate it to the other side. I believe all 4 arms will use the same animation action if you duplicated them in the beginning. Then all you do is animate 1 arm to do all the different movements that you want from all 4 arms, store those anims as separate actions and apply them to specific arms at specific times in the mixer. eliminating the need to animate 4 arms. 

 

EDIT:

Yeah, basically what this guy is doing

https://vimeo.com/12101630

around the minute to minute 30 or so marks... but with all 4. after youve animated a nice set for the first ne... then offset those anims in the mixer to where you want the other ones going

 

EDIT AGAIN:

Yeah i just built a basic rig and duplicated and offset anims no problem. It wasnt exactly how i explained it but it points you in the right direction

What wa different fom how i explained it, was you will have to store each separate tree's actions to have them separated. but its easy enough

[minilogoguy18]

Cloning and mirroring is meh. If you're going to make a 4 armed character make a 4 armed character and not one where the animations are copy/pasted from the upper arms to the lower arms.

 

@@Psyk0Sith needs to release his Grievous model, it's amazing.

[Psyk0Sith]

No 4 arm version on mine tho.

[Archangel35757]

Could be done easier as an NPC skeleton rather than the humanoid.

[Langerd]

I found out something interesting! 

Everybody knows the Neomarz1 Grievous model with 4 arms. It works but these extra arms look weird


After some searching i found this little movie 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nil8thiQtuo

Yeah. I think it is Rebel NPC parented to the playermodel you see. Why not code game like this - 

I made Grievous with 4 arms. I also put the 2 extra tags into the hands. My idea is to place in these tags not new lightsaber weapon BUT  npc that uses a playermodel which is just a tag with lightsaber. 

[Circa]

Ha. I forgot why @@redsaurus did that. Humans riding humans.