JK series _humanoid Character Animation Rig

[katanamaru]

All right so with the help you got me I got the program up and running, I got a JA project created, and I got the rig to show up and even found how to turn on the sabers...and that's it.

 

I tried clicking, selecting with click and drag, the arrow keys and couldn't get anything to bend, rotate or twist.

Any thing you can tell me to get me started?

I'll be at my folks place this week taking care of the pets while they are on vacation so I'll be checking tutorials out this week. I'm really wanting to start learning XSI so I can get some animations ready to go.

 

Also how would I load the Raven animations into XSI?

[minilogoguy18]

You'll have to learn some of the basics

 

S+ mouse buttons will navigate the view (look at the bottom right of the program window, you'll notice tips on lmb, mmb and rmb and what they do when a tool is active)

X= scale

C= rotate

V= translate

 

The best advice I can give though is to set it to the default Softimage layout, Mod View has it's own layout and it sucks IMO, they made it to make it easier for first timers but it's easier to follow the vast amount of Softimage tutorials in the standard layout since there aren't many Mod Tool specific tutorials mainly since it really isn't any different than the full version. You can do this by going on the top menu View>Layouts>Default.

 

The Raven models are in dotXSI 3.5 format which is an ASCII format based on Softimage scenes, the code is pretty much open which is how @@Archangel35757 is able to code it for 3ds Max. You can either do File>Import>dotXSI or just simply drag and drop them into the viewport.

 

Not sure why you'd want to look at the base animations, they will not have a character enveloped to them so they'll mainly be a bunch of nulls moving around but once you learn some things you can use them as reference and retarget the animations to the rig, I did that for the staff run in the tutorial video to have a starting point.

 

Best advice I can give without typing up the longest post on jkhub would be to start here,

 

[Tempust85]

Some animations such as root.xsi (found in the animation source files pack) won't import for me in Mod Tool, not sure if I'm doing something wrong.

[minilogoguy18]

It's not just Mod Tool but the normal version of Softimage the root.xsi file as well as the player models don't import properly, not sure why. The header shows them being exported from Softimage|XSI 2.x but it's like as if the files were tampered with for some reason, I wish Mike Gummelt would come back in and lmk why they fail to import. I know when Archangel imported the player models into 3ds max they imported but with odd errors like the skeleton being duplicated a few times.

[Tempust85]

Is it possible to edit the importer for xsi? I need to do more tests but I think I may know what part of the file its stopping on.

[minilogoguy18]

Not sure, if anything it's probably the files themselves, the player models stop after the pelvis bone and as for the root.xsi I believe it's the same issue but it's been a long time since I tried.

[Archangel35757]

Maybe see if they import properly in Max5 (if they're 3.0) or Blender or Milkshape. There is no importer code available for 3dsMax. I have importer code for Milkshape that I was going to try to convert for 3dsMax.

[Tempust85]

It's the "SI_IK_Joint" in the root.xsi file that stops it, removing this block allows it to proceed to the next bone. Also, I'm getting duplicates as I do in 3ds Max.

 

Version 3.0 doesn't write out IK joints but I can't seem to export a 3.5 file from Mod Tool as it keeps telling me function not supported. :\

 

Seems to me that XSI can export out 3.5 files with IK joints, but not import them.

[minilogoguy18]

The function not supported issue is resolved by manually triangulating a model and selecting "polygons" in the exporter dialogue, don't know why the triangulate function is capped on the dotXSI exporter in Mod Tool.

[Tempust85]

Replacing SI_IK_Joint with SI_Null in notepad allows root.xsi to import. However, the bones are not at proper angles and there are duplicates.

[minilogoguy18]

I wonder why this is, the nonhumanoid models such as the wampa or rancor import without problems. I wonder if the duplicates are coming from the LOD's.

[minilogoguy18]

OK, I'm bringing this back from the dead.

 

I tend to either get Google+ messages or PM's on this site about certain things on either tips on it's usage or someone managed to break the rig so I'm working on this again and going to try to get it to the point in which I feel like it should no longer be a BETA in the download's name.

 

So far I've reworked the face controllers to be a bit more appealing, fixed the roll division controllers and fixed the hand controllers. The roll division and hand controllers seemed to only work as I wanted if constraint compensation was on, which should only be used out of desperation as it can break the rig and cause certain constraints to act oddly.

 

Before I update the file again I'm going to test some options on even further automating the rig so that you can just simply rotate the hand controller and the arm will twist realistically without the need to use the arm's up vector constraints since they should only be used to keep the elbow from moving in unnatural ways.

 

Not sure of how many on here are willing but it'd be nice if someone took the time to do their best to break the rig so I can find any problems.

 

[Boothand]

Now I feel like an idiot for liking your original post from 2012, assuming it was posted today.

[minilogoguy18]

^No big deal, leaps and bounds of progress have been made since.

 

OK, I added a poll for anyone who might care, I could add the JK2 skeleton to the file so that it works for both games. Is anyone interested in even modding JK2?

[Boothand]

It's only a few months since I was making new humanoid animations in Blender for a multiplayer mod (Saber Shenanigans), wishing there was an IK rig. But I kind of doubt I'll do any more of this in JK series, and if it's a Softimage thing only, I can safely say no, for my part.

If someone ever wants to pick up where I left off, it could be handy, but I doubt it.

 

People still mod JK2 a bit, and I guess this forum sees some JK2 SP requests now and then. Is it a lot of work to support JK2? If not, it would be nice of course.

[minilogoguy18]

Wouldn't be hard, just don't know if anyone would actually use it.

[Tempust85]

I'm thinking just have one rig that animates all the bones that are present the JK2 & JKA skeletons. All JKA animation source files have the JK2 bones in them anyway.

 

 

 

 

Fun fact: The JK2 bones (toes, all 5 fingers with 3 segments) were "removed" during compile. The root.xsi was used to "control" what bones end up in the GLA by only keeping bones that have skin weights.

 

Fun fact: The lhang_tag_bone & the tail bones only appear in animations created for JKA. They are still missing from animations that were brought over from JK2.

 

Not so fun fact: If you want to add these bones back or new ones, you'll either need to edit the code to have a conversion table (similar to how JK2 models work in JKA) that would allow base JKA rigged models to work with the new GLA or you'd have to dump 100% compatibility and re-rig all models on a as-needed basis.

[minilogoguy18]

@@DT85 It will be 1 file, like you animate the rig as before and just middle click which model_root you want to export, JA or JO one. It's a shadow rig, the bones that move the Kyle model are not the bones that get exported, the skeleton that gets exported is a null one similar to what gets used for character weighing. It has it's own "dummy" mesh that's just a bunch of cubes since bones that have no weights are left out at compile.

 

If no ones modding JO in such a manner though I'll just leave it as is unless maybe some mods out there plan to add the bones back into JA since I know that's been discussed before.

[TheWhitePhoenix]

Will it be possible, once the animations are combined into one, that it will be able to be used not only in game but in modview as well?

[minilogoguy18]

Of course, watch the video in the tutorials section in my sig. You can load the animation either before merging with the _humanoid.gla or after. If you view it before you'll just see the dummy mesh which will be a bunch of small cubes. If you do it after you'll just have to add your animation to the animation.cfg file so that it loads with whatever player model you load in modview.

 

People shouldn't be intimidated by character animation for this game anymore, I've literally made it so easy that first timers are getting animations in game, wish some of them would post their stuff on here but they're all people who are on like ModDB making stuff for whatever conversion they're doing.

 

I'm helping someone through PM as we speak who's making cutscene animations, they had a simple problem. I tend to get these people every so often that sign up here and PM me about this.

 

On a side note: I started playing around with the AT-ST again, I may release the scene file for it as a learning tool on rig construction as it has some advanced expressions driving 1 of the mechanical joints in the legs as well as a reverse foot (dog leg) setup.

[Tempust85]

Tbh, no one should have been intimidated at all. The tools we use now are practically the same tools used 10+ years ago. Mod Tool was around then and so was 3ds Max (you could only use versions 4.2 & 5 for animation). The only thing that's new now is Noesis supporting GLM/GLA & Blender.

 

Dragon provided a cheap-looking, free way of animating. I still believe tools like Dragon were only used (after the animation source was released) because people were too lazy to understand how to do things with Mod Tool & 3ds Max - which I call the "carcass method".

[Fire Phoenix]

It would be nice to add open-close eyes controller and easier face emotions animations cuz it takes a while to make for example a smile right now.

[Tempust85]

It's just a few rotations and keying them. Shouldn't take you a while at all.

[minilogoguy18]

I fixed the eye controls, in JA the leye and reye bones are used to control the eye lids where in JO they were used for the eye balls where the top and bottom eye lids had their own bones. I thought about making some face controls but with how limited the _humanoid bone set is I realize now it would actually be best to use a custom skeleton or even the JO one for cut scenes since cut scenes use their own .gla files and don't have to match what's used in MP. You would of course need to weigh a dedicated model to that skeleton but your end result would be far better.

 

Here would be an example of what I would do say if I needed to to some facial animation since shape animation would be best but JA doesn't support it so my next choice would be something like Face Robot. The workflow seems so easy and straight forward.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzXRkIOEZ8

 

@@Archangel35757, weren't you working on some sort of shape animation system for JA or something like that?

[Archangel35757]

I am planning to build a facial rig setup in 3dsMax and then create a new facial GLA from that which will have poses/animations for all phoneme/visemes and facial expressions (from neutral to: fear, anger, joy, sadness, surprise, disgust).

 

It would be nice (@@eezstreet, @@Xycaleth) if this facial GLA was added into ModView to create a "face room" dialog window where people could string together there facial poses/animations add an actor audio file for phoneme parsing (using PRAAT as I plan to do in 3dsMax) and then export out the final .LIP and .VCD files the engine would use.

 

My (bone-based) facial rig GUI will do all of this in 3dsMax... would be nice if ModView could do it as well (using the building blocks within the facial GLA).

 

Too bad FaceRobot is not freely available to XSI ModTool.