Faction thread 4: Dwarves

**uanime5** · 05-16-2007, 13:00

Congratualtions, now it's possible to make units of any height. Do the other characters aim lower to attack the dwarves?

**Bwian** · 05-23-2007, 16:01

Last night was a momentous evening for modding ( well...as far as I am concerned! )

I received in the mail a set of alpha tools from Knight Errant which when run, resulted in the application of a brand new set of bone start points straight into the standard animations. There swas a slight hitch, in that the location of ht eroot bone was not translated in proportion to the new position... but KnighErrant has found th emissing code, and I have a revised version to check. This, folks, means we now have the tools to take a CUSTOM SKELETON OF ANY PROPORTIONS and apply it to a STANDARD ANIMATION and move all the changes into it. NO NEED TO RE-WRITE ALL THE ANIMATIONS and it's just a matter of minutes work to make the whole thing work. The tools are not all that polished, but for an alpha release, they work well and efficiently.

This will give us Dwarves that work AND look like Dwarves, rather than hobbits. Also....the system will allow us to do Orcs with longer arms, broad shoulders and slightly shorter legs.

Downside...there is a limit to how many we can use, since it all adds up to systems overheads and an enlarged mod.

So..Dwarves will only get a limited number of skeletons to use. They will need 2h axemen, crossbowmen, mace ( will work for axes, hammers etc where a shield is used ) and I will also need to check how crew animations are done. Might need a Dwarf crew set too.

Orcs will get archers and swords or mace variants. Plus crew if needed.

Everything else will have to be done by scaling

**Dogman55** · 05-23-2007, 20:38

Heh. Not sure if I understand what's been found, but either way, if it helps the mod, great!

**Bwian** · 05-23-2007, 21:00

In short ( excuse the pun ) we can make correctly proportioned Dwarves.

RTW modding was always limited by the skeletons. We could scale them up or down, but that was all we could do. Dwarves were done ... but they were scaled down people, which meant ALL the poportions were reduced. They looked like children... while fantasy Dwarves should be as broad sholdered as a human, and just shorter of leg. We couldn't do what we needed to make them correct.

Also....orces need slightly longer arms than a human, broad shoulders, and slightly shorter legs. Again....just using a normal human skeleton did not look good....I know...I tried!

But now, thanks to the work Grumpy Old Man and KnightErrant have put in to fully understand the MESH format and the animations that power them, and thanks to Caliban arranging to get a full set of stock animations released in an uncompressed and accessable form, we have the power to change the skeleton ANY WAY WE WANT. Better still....we can then force the stock animation routines to work on the new skeletons without having to re-write every single one of them! A stock skeleton uses about 50 or 60 animations. Each one would have to have been edited by hand. That would take weeks. With the alpha toolset KE sent me, I did the job in 5 minutes.

So...in summary .... I know have the tools and knowledge to stretch, tweak, scale and then animate any shape we want as long as it's broadly human, and not have to re-do ANY animations. Having done a lot of animation work for RTW mods...I know just how much work this has saved me, and how major a step this is towards making a really high quality fantasy mod. Dwarves have nver ben done properly in a TW game.... they were just tiny children made by scaling down .... no longer.

I'm happy about this...really happy!

**Casuir** · 05-24-2007, 00:07

This is only useful for re-positioned skeletons, not ones with different bones right?

**Dogman55** · 05-24-2007, 01:55

Ah! That's more understadable! That sounds awesome! You did mention that you need to limit skeletons though, what exactly do you mean by that?

**Bwian** · 05-24-2007, 10:48

Casuir ...at the moment, we are just limited to moving bones about. This is fine for what we want to do for now. GOM is trying to build a scratch skeleton and implement animations for it. If that works..then the sky is the limit !

**Ciaran** · 05-24-2007, 12:29

Originally Posted by Bwian

In short ( excuse the pun ) we can make correctly proportioned Dwarves.

RTW modding was always limited by the skeletons. We could scale them up or down, but that was all we could do. Dwarves were done ... but they were scaled down people, which meant ALL the poportions were reduced. They looked like children... while fantasy Dwarves should be as broad sholdered as a human, and just shorter of leg. We couldn't do what we needed to make them correct.

Also....orces need slightly longer arms than a human, broad shoulders, and slightly shorter legs. Again....just using a normal human skeleton did not look good....I know...I tried!

Well I think the ones you showed here in the RTW modding forums did look good, but this new ability is simply fantastic! More so, it assures me that there will be orcs, that they won´t get scrapped because of the difficult of making them. Great news indeed

**Casuir** · 05-24-2007, 14:08

On the crew animations bwian they were one of the few that showed changes made to the skeletons with a hex editor when we tried it. I'm pretty sure the changes were visible right through the siege engines animations and only reverted when idle. Piccy:

Might be worth testing further, could cut down a bit more on anim overheads.
Look to be wardog anims in there as well, could be used for a few things

**Bwian** · 05-24-2007, 15:00

Right ... hte outline Unit List bit!

Warriors - goes without saying!

Miners

Troll Slayers

Hammerers

Crossbowmen

Thunderers

Long Beards

Dwarf crew will also be required. They will be made as simplified variations on the warriors with no shields and simple axes.