Yet another animation thread!

[Bwian]

Trying to make working chariots has raised many qiestions, most of which KE has managed to answer...or GOM has popped in and magic'ed up a solution...so I am hoping the animation gods will grant me another boon.

( at this point, I believe it is customary to sacrifice a chicken or a small goat without blemish or some such )

Right...that's done. Now for the question :2thumbsup:

Centres. Origins... call them what you will, but I was wondering what actually is defined as the point at which the object moves. I am assuming it is linked or driven by the root bone ... which I am also assuming is the bone with order 0.

So...for my chariot, I am effectively taking my chariot and making it from a horse. But...the horse animations will need to be changed some. The centre, for starters, needs to move back to make the chariot the centre, and the horse bits at the front. This is only really an issue when the chariot turns....to avoid the chariot 'sliding' it's wheels. Now...I suppoes I can do this easily enough by changing the rotation of the thing in the turning and making the horse section translate more than rotate... but it would be a LOT easier if I could just play the shuffle animation on the horsesw, and rotate the charior round.

If hte thing automatically revolves around the 'root' then I should make the chariot the 'root' and move all the horse bones down the hierarchy.

Am I thinking this through correctly...or is this just a waste of effort, and not needed?

Please, oh animation gods, enlighten your humble servant :beam:

[KnightErrant]

@Bwian,

Good question, which is "meeting code" for I don't know the answer.
bone_pelvis or bone_H_saddle are the root bones for humans and horses
respectively, but the animations I've look at for humans just move them
forward, I haven't looked in detail at the horse's

fs_horse_stand_a_turn_90_cw_1.cas

animation which is one of the only "turn" anims I see.
I think you are right that if you animate a turn about the root bone
in the default horse skeleton, the following chariot structure
might "skew" unrealistically.

That much said, even if you pivot about the bone_H_saddle bone of
your chariot is it bad in the viewing or do you just think it might be
bad. I don't really know an answer to this; i don't want to advocate
a solution whidh make existing animations invalid since that just makes
more work for the animators (you). :laugh4:

[Bwian]

Having got 'experimental' on the thing, I had a bit of an idea :D

I left the h_saddle bone exactly where it was. In the skeleton, it had co-ordinates 0,0,0 when I looked at the extracted skeleton file in notepad. It would figure, then, that the animations are worked from this base-point.

I also noted that animations are immediately translated away from the model file into what translates as 'ground' in game. So...in theory...any messing about with where ground was or where the root was would screw up the stock animations and require all of them to be moved up/down.

So...I moved EVERYTHING ELSE and left the saddle bone where it was. Your animation utilities will translateth estart position of all the bnes, and apply the rotations from there, so this just means that all the other bones pivot correctly in the animations....they are just moved forwards!

As I suspected, all the 'turn' animations pivoted arounbd the saddle ( root ) bone, and this now looks much better. I still have some 'issues' to resolve overall...but this seems to have done what I wanted it to do. Everything does seem to be calculated from the relative position of the root, so leaving the root where it is and moving everything else seems to do what I need. It also means the rider/chariot join will be at the saddle point ...which was something else I was concerned over. I noticed in RTW when making silly robots that you could not safely mount the rider too far away from the 'saddle' bone, or you got 'drifting' when the thing moved. I think I have avoided that by doing it this way too.

Now....back to the grindstone :whip:

[Bwian]

whoah .... thats not right!

Spotted some very odd behaviour when I properly rigged teh front end of the model, so I re-ran animerge to have a look.

This was the skeleton before:
https://img221.imageshack.us/img221/7239/beforehs1.jpg

And after I had applied the jiggery pokery and created the new animations, animerge shows me this:
https://img221.imageshack.us/img221/5927/afterui9.jpg

It looks to me as though the rotations have been scaled the same way the positions have been.

EDIT: I had not zeroed the bones .... which explains the bulk of what was going on. There is still a major concern over the 'feet' bones... they are WAY out of place, and swinging wildly. There seems to be a steady loss of position as you go down the hierarchy. I think this is hte same thing I noticed with the weapon bones on some of the attempts I made to make new skeletons for the Orcs/Dwarves.

I have got the thing to work OK by ignoring hte feet, and making the hooves part of the lowerleg...but I can't make it workOK for the feet :(

[Bwian]

Good news ....
https://img232.imageshack.us/img232/9647/goodyx7.jpg

I have it moving pretty much like a chariot should, turning like a chariot, and I have got the mesh set up correctly for what I wanted. Additionally, the size and unit spacing seems to be working well. The stock horse animations are not perfect, and will need some alterations in key areas, but that will just be a matter of careful tweaking once I have resolved the more serious issues.

The bad news ....
https://img65.imageshack.us/img65/3313/badyw6.jpg

I don;t know why it is doing this at all. The skeleton has been manipulated, but no extra bones have been added. The animations have all been adjusted (using the latest version of KE's toolset) and when I drag the animations into animerge, with the MS3D I turned into this mesh, everything looks perfect and as expected. When I run it in game, though, I get the rather odd effect pictured above. Look at the legs...front and rear. There is a dislocation of the leg joints which is most bizarre.

I have double checked all the animations, skeleton text file etc. and can find nothing. The animerge runs are perfect...but this is screwed up. :wall: