Animations

**KnightErrant** · 06-15-2007, 21:54

Ok, some success with adding extra bones to make a tailed unit.
Wrote a utility to reorder bones and put the weapon/shield bones at
the end with the new bones in front of them. Another utility exports
the new skeleton file and hierarchy tree to all the .cas files in a directory
putting in 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 quats for the new bone rotations and
0.0 0.0 0.0 for the new bone animations deltas and puts the new bones
in the pose data. Then used animmerge to pull the animation into the
.ms3d file and opened in Milkshape with the walk animation. Then animated
bone_tail1 in the keyframer. Here's the result:

I just assigned some vertices to bone_tail2 to make a fake tail using
the existing vertices in armored_sergeants. The red circle is bone_tail1
and the green is bone_tail2. The animation just wags the tail for 19 frames.

The problem is back converting. GrumpyOldMan's didn't work for me so I
tried the Python meshconverter which just uses the bones that are in
the .ms3d file. The only modification is the node numbers. I'm guessing they
should go like this:

Code:

bone_pelvis       0
bone_rthigh       1
bone_rlowerleg    2 
bone_rfoot        3 
bone_abs          4
bone_torso        5
bone_head         6
bone_jaw          7
bone_eyebrow      8
bone_rclavical    9
bone_rupperarm    10 
bone_relbow       11
bone_rhand        12
bone_lclavical    13
bone_lupperarm    14
bone_lelbow       15
bone_lhand        16
bone_lthigh       17
bone_llowerleg    18
bone_lfoot        19
bone_tail1        20
bone_tail2        21
bone_weapon01     22
bone_weapon       22
bone_weapon02     23
bone_weapon03     24
bone_shield01     24
bone_shield       24

Will try to make a new animation family and put it in descr_skeleton.txt
and see if the extra bones work in the game this weekend.

**GrumpyOldMan** · 06-16-2007, 01:20

Hi KE

Originally Posted by KnightErrant

The problem is back converting. GrumpyOldMan's didn't work for me so I
tried the Python meshconverter which just uses the bones that are in
the .ms3d file. The only modification is the node numbers. I'm guessing they
should go like this:

Will try to make a new animation family and put it in descr_skeleton.txt
and see if the extra bones work in the game this weekend.

You're quite right, until I can get my a*** into gear and finish the template version of the converter, you won't be able to use the converter for anything else than vanilla skeletons. The reason I'm going with a template system is so that people can convert from one skeleton to another ie if you wanted dwarf dismounted templars, you'd convert the mesh using a dwarf template and adjust the vertices to fit, or standard bearer, etc. The merge groups function would also use the templates. I may be able to face a long, long, long scroll of source code again soon

but haven't had the chance to do so lately. Wish me luck as I battle with the GUI.

Cheers

GrumpyOldMan

**KnightErrant** · 06-16-2007, 02:47

I do wish you luck with the GUI. Its always the most tedious part,
at least in Python it's been. There isn't a whole lot of documentation,
and usually that's wrong as well.