Animations

[KnightErrant]

Ahh, thanks for that info. Reading zxiang1983's thread has me thinking
re-packing is the only way to get this to work too. Kind of ugly if that's
the only way, though.

[KnightErrant]

OK, documentation is out of the way. Back to the fun stuff.
Wrote an animmerge script to combine a stock ms3d mesh with
a cas file. Here's the walk animation in Milkshape:



EDIT: Forgot the significant part, the shields held up is done by changing the animations in Milkshape.

and also the celebration .cas in Milkshape:




From here you use the animextract utility to extract to a .cas to put in
game as:



EDIT: These are the shields held up in-game.

NOTE This ain't right, everybody has become left-handed. Not that I mind, I'm
left-handed myself.

Unresolved Problems:

(1) Does no_animdb=1 work? PM into Caliban hasn't been answered.
Can't unpack skeleton.dat into the /animations directory because OS constraints don't allow a file without an extension to have the same
name as a directory. (Repeating xziang1983 here, been down this road.)

(2) Unpack in a higher directory? Maybe, haven't tried this.

(3) Unpack in a lower directory? Same answer, try later.

(4) Repacking the pack isn't that bad. Live with it.

(5) Maybe the TYPE files have an implied extension we just don't know
about. This would be nice but we need information.

(6) What the heck is the global data? I just saved it in the materials comment
section but need to know what it really is. Also the mystery 8 floats at
the end, also written into the materials comment section.

(7) Outside the bounds, but the TYPE files (using the language of
descr_skeleton.txt) have bone info in them, can these be modded
to change the sizes of units re Bwian's question in the mesh thread?

[alpaca]

Haha those sergeants are really screwed
The arms look weird... hmm, maybe the game saves some bone positions you didn't export correctly?

[KnightErrant]

I just don't know how to use Milkshape. The verts didn't
move with the joints when I edited the keyframes. Anyway,
just an experiment for repacking and putting modded cas's
back in game.

Got a reply from Caliban. He showed me a .jpg of his /animations
directory. Could not see from that if the type files were unpacked
there or not but the .evt files are definately there so they need to
be found and unpacked.

I asked for two experiments: try searching for navy_strat*.* and
fs_camel*.*. If these don't turn up any files then skeletons.dat
isn't meant to be unpacked and the question should be settled.

I've been looking at the data at the top of the type files
before it gets to the animation families and the standard skeleton rig is
in there. These could probably be modded to make custom
animations for re-rigged figures, i.e. like dwarves etc., if the engine
will accept more entries in skeletons.dat and skeletons.idx.

[Casuir]

Search in the skeleton.dat? Not sure if I follow you right here but if your looking for animations in there with this as part of the filename you wont find them, however the animations in the descr_skeletons file under the fs_camel and strat_navy all reference cas's are in the dat. Sorry if I'm not with you here, having trouble following this

About the evt files, looking at one of the ones that's not packed theres reference to anim_cannon_creak or similar, events.dat has the same text followed by paths for relevant sounds. Looking around a bit in there theres stuff like anim_archer_aim which in turn corresponds to text in the skeleton.dat at the archers animations. Possible they're packed in here?

[GrumpyOldMan]

Hi KE et al

EDIT: These are the shields held up in-game.

NOTE This ain't right, everybody has become left-handed. Not that I mind, I'm
left-handed myself.

Ahh, you're a firm but cruel drill sergeant, making your men dislocate their shoulders just so they reverse their arms and pretend to be The Queens Own Left Handed Regiment - specialists in guarding the left flank!! . My guess is that you've misplaced the axes conversion x*-1 somewhere.

Unresolved Problems:

(1) Does no_animdb=1 work? PM into Caliban hasn't been answered.
Can't unpack skeleton.dat into the /animations directory because OS constraints don't allow a file without an extension to have the same
name as a directory. (Repeating xziang1983 here, been down this road.)

Nope, been playing with this, no_animdb is not available in the retail version so we'll have to pack. With the skel name and folder conflicts, my thoughts are that the skeleton names are just handles so if we modify them by the additon of "_skl" and consistently use this across all the relevant files (modeldb,etc) it should take away this bugbear

(2) Unpack in a higher directory? Maybe, haven't tried this.

(3) Unpack in a lower directory? Same answer, try later.

The retail game seems to just run off the idx/dat files, unless the file name and folder conflicts are causing the game to crash

(4) Repacking the pack isn't that bad. Live with it.

Agreed, it's not too much of a price to pay

(5) Maybe the TYPE files have an implied extension we just don't know
about. This would be nice but we need information.

If you have a look at the calls to the skeletons in modeldb just the normal name is used, if they were it would have to be hardcoded but it doesn't help us with name and folder conflicts.

(6) What the heck is the global data? I just saved it in the materials comment
section but need to know what it really is. Also the mystery 8 floats at
the end, also written into the materials comment section.

Once I lash myself into a frenzy of documentation completion (hardest part for me) for the RTW CAS to M2TW converter, I'll go back and have another look at the animation files and tie down the loose ends.

(7) Outside the bounds, but the TYPE files (using the language of
descr_skeleton.txt) have bone info in them, can these be modded
to change the sizes of units re Bwian's question in the mesh thread?

I'm pretty sure that we can modify skeletons adding, moving and rescaling bones as long as we remember tha the engine is looking for various flags for animation ie bone_Rhand, saddle, etc

Cheers

GrumpyOldMan

[KnightErrant]

Yep, it was a missed x -> -x in the animextract that did the
parity inversion on my guys. I was so careful to take these
OUT of the animmerge. I'll do some surveying on the cas's
to see how the globals and final floats vary. It is an addiction,
good times!

Edit: Read up a little on animating, better example of raised shields
with the MTW2_Spear_walk.cas.

[GrumpyOldMan]

Hi KE

Yep, it was a missed x -> -x in the animextract that did the
parity inversion on my guys. I was so careful to take these
OUT of the animmerge. I'll do some surveying on the cas's
to see how the globals and final floats vary. It is an addiction,
good times!

Edit: Read up a little on animating, better example of raised shields
with the MTW2_Spear_walk.cas.

Aw shucks, I kinda miss those sinister left handers

I've gone back and revisited the anim files and this is what I've dug out so far

Cas Anim format

Short - Num_Frame

short - Num_bone

num_frame * num_bone * float*4 (Quaternion rotations)

num_frame * num_bone * float*3 (local positon data - Pelvis in relation to Root Node ie height off ground, others unchanged from rest positions)

num_frame * float*2 (x and incremental z movement for Root Node)

2 * float (0?)

num_frame * float (approximate absolute z position of Root Node but in reverse order compared to animation ??)

num_frame * float *3 (absolute position of root node and pelvis height)

I'll have a look at the rest later.

Cheers

GrumpyOldMan

[KnightErrant]

Aargh, of course, missed that completely. I guess I don't
think in hex after all. So the 14 00 14 in the header after the initial short
count of frames is the bone count for what gets animated.
The variants I saw must have been strat map units which don't
have 20 animated bones... Got a better clue for looking at things
now, many thanks.