Carcass.exe Bone Jitter

[Archangel35757]

@@DT85, @@minilogoguy18, @@Xycaleth, @@eezstreet:  Let's move the discussion from DT's status thread to this thread if that's ok with everyone...  I just looked at the Luke model with the default _humanoid.gla (looping the BOTH_WIND animation) and when you zoom in and play the animation slow... the bone jitter becomes quite evident. 

 

It's more prevelant at the end of bone chains (i.e., the fingers) which makes sense, since the errors would accumulate down the hierarchy... the other name that Gummelt dropped to me was Gil Gribb (the main programmer behind Ghoul2 according to Gummelt) who now works at epic games.  I wrote him and he replied (cc'ing Gummelt) as follows:

 

 

I would hope that someone at raven could find you the carcass code (like maybe on a VisualSourceSafe server or a backup thereof). It wouldn’t be particularly secret or proprietary.

 

I don’t remember much honestly. If you could get the code and ask questions about pasted parts of the code...well I might be able to help.

 

-Gil

 

I noticed that "BOTH_WIND" is a version dotXSI 3.5 file... @@DT85, can you find a good example of this jitter in a 3.0 file?  I'd like to verify that this jitter is not present in the officially released dotXSI animation assets.

 

As an aside... it also appears to be present in the SoF2 GLA (when viewed in ModView-- looking at the "pistolstandaim01" animation).

[minilogoguy18]

I dunno, I just looked at the walk cycle of the AT-RT and there is no jitter in the toes, it was exported as a dotXSI 3.5 file from Softimage 2013.

 

Also don't see anything wrong with the BOTH_STAFF_RUN that I replaced that is seen in the video tutorial I made on the rig, this animation was exported as a dotXSI 3.5 file from Mod Tool 7.5.

 

I never use dotXSI 3.0, there is no reason to.

[Archangel35757]

@@minilogoguy18-- Are you talking about looking at your XSI file in Softimage?  Or are you looking at your resulting AT-RT.gla file in ModView?  You have to zoom way-in and slow the animation down to see it.

 

@@DT85 -- Well, I just imported BOTH_WIND.xsi into 3ds Max 8 and I can't see the jitter in the left hand bones that I saw when viewing it in ModView-- could this be just a looping bias issue internal to ModView (i.e., are we chasing a ModView Ghost)?  Or has this been confirmed inside of the game-engine?

[Tempust85]

It jitters AFTER it's been converted to GLA using carcass. The source file itself has no jitter.

[Archangel35757]

It jitters AFTER it's been converted to GLA using carcass. The source file itself has no jitter.

Thanks for the clarification But have you seen this in the engine? Or only in MODView?

[Tempust85]

Seen it in Noesis, Modview & ingame. It's just the way carcass compresses the animations methinks. What ever Rich did for Noesis produces next-to-no jitter.

[Archangel35757]

Seen it in Noesis, Modview & ingame. It's just the way carcass compresses the animations methinks. What ever Rich did for Noesis produces next-to-no jitter.

Would you be willing to make a video that clearly shows this carcass jitter issue best-- so that we can send it to Mike Gummelt to pass on to Ste Cork and James Monroe?

 

Maybe that would motivate them to dig up the source code...

[Tempust85]

What I think would more motivate them is knowing about how dotXSI is coming to an end and us modders desperately need the code to add more formats

[mrwonko]

The source to the G2 format is available so anybody can write a converter from scratch, like I did with the Blender exporter.

 

The jitter is inherent in the file format since bone transformations are stored fairly compressed, as a position with a precision of 1/64 unit and a rotation as a quaternion with 16-bit fixed point components (with a precision of 1/16383).

[Xycaleth]

You can still reduce the jitter though even if you're losing precision. And yeah, there's not really muh need for the carcass source code if you plan on converting from a different/new format...

[Tempust85]

I doubt we will get it this time, so let's have this as the last time we ask.

[minilogoguy18]

Only see it in the animation made with the rig slightly, still don't see it on the AT-RT but the amount the bone rotates  and length of animation could cause or keep it from happening.

[Tempust85]

The longer the animation, the more the jitter from what I can see.

[eezstreet]

What's wrong with using Noesis exactly? Can Rich not fix the G2 export issues?

[Xycaleth]

The longer the animation, the more the jitter from what I can see.

I would expect longer bone chains to increase jitter, but longer animations? That just sounds like really poor code

[Tempust85]

Well whatever it is, Noesis doesn't do it.

[Archangel35757]

@@DT85, @@minilogoguy18, @@Xycaleth, @@eezstreet, @@Raz0r:

 

GREAT NEWS!!!

 

Raven is going to release the Carcass.exe source code to us!!!

 

email response from Mike Gummelt:

 

James and Ste have discussed this some. Sounds like they're going to see if they can find the carcass code (when Ste gets back from vacation). Since we're not using this tech anymore, maybe it would be okay to release it. James says your problem sounds like "a standard matrix quantization issue"...

I said I would await their next response...

[eezstreet]

Whoa, nice! Didn't see that one coming. Tell them to get us EffectsEd, BehavEd and whatever else if they can!

[Archangel35757]

Whoa, nice! Didn't see that one coming. Tell them to get us EffectsEd, BehavEd and whatever else if they can!

I will ask Gummelt... but specifically-- the only other things we're missing are: ShaderED, EffectsED, BehaveED?

[eezstreet]

We don't have StringED -at all- but it's not too different from SOF2's version. I'm aware of a few other tools but they weren't remotely useful.

We need IBIze source too, it's the ICARUS compiler. Other than that, I think that's everything.

 

StringED is referenced in several source files, it's what they made the .str files with. There's something called StripED, I'm not sure if that's the same thing or what, but it's for JK2/SOF2 and not JKA

[Archangel35757]

I thought IBIze source was available-- @@redsaurus submitted IBIze-mac on JKHub and said he revised it based on Raven source code released in Star Trek:Elite Force SDK... @@eezstreet -- can you verify???

[eezstreet]

Ah, it may well have been in the EF SDK. I hadn't considered that.

[redsaurus]

hi

[eezstreet]

ohai

I can has StringED? :<

[Archangel35757]

@@eezstreet, @@redsaurus -- can you guys check the ST:EF released SDK source to see what else might be checked off of the Christmas list? Thanks...

 

EDIT: Also, can you help provide me with justification???? For example (@@Xycaleth): we need the ShaderED source code because we want to revise the shaderED code to add support for normal map stages???