Somewhat large and ambitious animation project...

[minilogoguy18]

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44%

 

I'll let the video show what I've been up to lately

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF5bMWtH2fI

 

You may be wondering why I'm doing this, simple, JK2 had way more bones, most notably, all finger joints, toe bones (which can lead to better foot roll setups for animators) and more facial bones. Every single source file has all the bones that were removed AND they are all animated. Why they cut them out from the game I'll never know since it would have given the game better looking animations. Another huge reason why I did this is because animating the JA skeleton is annoying, the skeleton files out there are nothing like what the games developers used and does not animate well, mostly cause of the lack of toe bones making a proper foot rig impossible. This way I can use the rig I made to it's full potential.

 

The real test will be in the end seeing if all the games existing models get along with having more bones, existing models wont be able to make use of all the bones without being reweighed to it but I already have a handful of the base models weighed in XSI, tranferring weights can easily be done since 80% of the games models all share nearly identical proportions (they were all probably made from 1 basic "base" mesh with deatails added later) so that's not too big of a deal.

 

I figure at least some of the large scale mods could make use of this, maybe JKG since the rig I made can so easily be animated unlike all the other FK skeletons out there where you have to go though and rotate each bone to pose a limb rather than have 1 Ik controller that can in seconds pose an arm or leg.

 

Just thought I'd share this, even if no one uses it I'd still find a lot of use from it.

[minilogoguy18]

Thanks, hit a snag about a week ago which halted it to pretty much where it is now but found a work around, hopefully it'll be done in a couple of weeks. I'll also release the Softimage file for anyone who wants it, I'll have to rig Kyle up to it so it's a little more aesthetically pleasing.

 

It'll be a big file since it'll have 21376 frames of animation, each sequenced is labeled in the animation mixer but you'll notice a good deal are missing since there are many sequences that reference frames of longer sequences, an example would be one of the death animations, there will be another sequence that uses the final frame for the body laying dead, those such sequences wont be labeled.

[DT.]

Each model needs to be recompiled at the very least to work with a GLA that has a different amount of bones than the one used during the original compile time. Found this out when I added back the fingers, toes, eyebrows & eyelids when I was working with JKG. Most of the animations still have these bones animated, just raven decided to ommit them during compile.

[minilogoguy18]

^Did you just add the bones to 1 model or did you go through all the animations and recompile to get a new _humanoid.gla like I'm doing?

 

I'm asking because just about every custom model out there is missing bones and they don't get errors, granted it's only missing 2 but they are still missing. The 2 tail bones are not in all the skeleton files out there being used by modelers but they are in the games skeleton, open a base model in modview to see that they are there.

[eezstreet]

Nice job minilogoguy!

Definitely will be important with JKG.

[DT.]

^Did you just add the bones to 1 model or did you go through all the animations and recompile to get a new _humanoid.gla like I'm doing?

 

I'm asking because just about every custom model out there is missing bones and they don't get errors, granted it's only missing 2 but they are still missing. The 2 tail bones are not in all the skeleton files out there being used by modelers but they are in the games skeleton, open a base model in modview to see that they are there.

 

I recompiled all the JKA animations into a new GLA, I did not alter any of the .xsi files just the "master model" which is the weighted model to tell carcass what bones are to be kept. I found other models will load, but some areas of the model might be distorted. Pretty sure that had to do with there being a set list of bones in the GLM that didn't match the new list in the GLA in the same order. Re-rigged some models and then it worked fine.

 

EDIT:

 

I lost my compiling folder but I think in the end the prototype I made had 70 bones including all fingers, toes and extra facial bones.

[minilogoguy18]

^When I tried that I got errors because of the lhand_tag_bone/lhang_tag_bone name mismatch and some animations had the tail bones and some did not, I couldn't even get a new GLA file. In some it kept trying to reference the roots and effectors on the IK chains since some files have IK bone chains where some are just simple null hierarchies.

 

I figured it should work considering the community skeletons out there being used are missing some things that are in the base model files, like the mentioned tail bones that are present say if you load up Kyle in Modview, seems they're there just to get better deformation of the buttocks rather than something like capes but I could be wrong.

 

The annoying thing about the base skeleton that only uses 50 something bones is it's annoying to get a good foot control when there is no toe bone.

 

So the models would load but some didn't work quite right? What areas were distorted? Sounds like a hierarchy problem, if it was the arms and legs then I may know why.

[DT.]

Yeah I got warnings too about some bones not being in some animations, but carcass just puts the bones in there anyways its just that they aren't animated in a few animations. Raven also had this, try recompiling the original animations and you'll see the warnings they would have gotten. The 2 tail bones were in the original JKA GLA, just not really utilised by Raven. They weren't really animated, they just ran off the movement of the thigh bones due to hierarchy.

 

The models would load but because of the bone amount mismatch, they became distorted unless I recompiled. Doesn't matter if they have the new bones or not, they just need to use the new GLA during compile.

[minilogoguy18]

Oh I see, rather than reweighing them to all the added bones you just ran the compiler say with the source player model files to spit out a new glm? That doesn't seem like too much trouble considering we have all the base models in .xsi format. Someone could though redo the weights if they wanted though of course, it's not really hard, the fact that all the base models share nearly identical proportions and the GATOR tool in Softimage makes weight transferring pretty flawless as long as the shapes are somewhat similar but doesn't have to be perfect.

 

What I'm doing now is importing each sequence and storing it's action as a source and copying clips over to an un animated skeleton that has all the bones with the proper left hand naming so there shouldn't be any errors on compile since it will be one massive file. I have a connection mapping template set up to overcome the naming problems that come from most of those files actually being JO animations that are recycled, I also have another file that I use as a shadow rig for the sequences that use a IK skeleton setup since the heirarchy in those files are VERY different. The final result will contain a null object skeleton with all animations with the IK roots and effectors no longer present, hierarchy will match what is seen in modiview just with the added bones that shouldn't interferre since all the missing bones are children to what normally exists in JA. I could see though if say I added a bone to the spine, now that would cause problems with the weights but not something that is at the end of the chain.

[DT.]

Yep, I just recompiled say kyle.xsi against the new GLA and that fixed any distortion. At least with what you're doing, you can add any bones you feel like to all the animations.

[minilogoguy18]

^Yeah it'd be quite simple to do that.

 

This file also wouldn't be restricted to the version of Softimage I'm using since I can just export the mixer that contains the animation sources and just export the skeleton file as a dotXSI 3 file then someone with an older version could just import everything and it would be just as good as my scene file. That has been actually one of the main reasons of doing this, an editable _humanoid file that anyone could dabble with in say something like Mod Tool that's freeware. I guess the blender plugin could import the _humanoid.gla but it wouldn't have all the sequences labeled with character rigged to it, which will probably be Kyle.

[minilogoguy18]

Well I have been updating the progress bar so you can keep an eye on that to get a general idea but it's taking time, I update it every time I chisel away at the file.