Animations .... what can we do with them?

[GrumpyOldMan]

Hi Bwian

Tried it again, and made sure I had the weapon in as well, with a scale of 1.2. The model has scaled perfectly, and the animation shows the skeleton has scaled too. Lovely

Now....I have managed to duplicate the error..and it was rather odd. I ran the game having forgotten to amend the skeletons used. I had switched from knfeman to a more appropriate Mace set, and inadvertantly forgot to update it to Macex ( my scaled one ). The model ran fine, but the feet were underground. I must have messed up the skeleton def somehow, and wasn't getting the correct version. I'm amazed it actually ran at all!

Because the models are fairly close in size the difference between normal anims and scaled anims isn't too obvious only the feet sinking into the ground is a dead giveaway. Figures will run happily with mismatched anims, just as long as they have a full set and matched up against their bone structure in their mesh.

But this is great all round! Coupled with the tools KE sent me today to make abstract skeletons, I am now one happy bunny! I can scale, I can tweak, and I can do things I never could with RTW .... and I think it's absolutely fantastic!

Here's a sample of what I'm working on as a test project, to see if we can get new mounts and skeletons with additional bones into the game:-



People may not want to use it but at least it's fun for now . After I finish there should be a new dragon/raptor skeleton and anims available for people to use.

@@@@@KE - I've had a further message from Mete on Time and Timing, seems he answered my question in haste and now wishes to add further information. It seems that the time is indeed timing, but he answered on the basis of a 1 fps model where the timing would be 1 per frame. The FPS value for the ms3d model/anim should be 20.0 (I'm amending my converter to fix this - I had 10.0 in this slot) and the frames should increase by 0.05 per frame, starting at 0.05 for the first frame. This shows the anim in real time.

Cheers

GrumpyOldMan

[Bwian]

Looks promising.

I can think of a few uses for a skeleton like that ... especially for the Lizardmen.

How about an arachnid type of skeleton? Would that be possible? I am assuming there is no limit to the number of bones other than common sense and the burden of animating.

[KnightErrant]

@GOM
Awesome dragon. Ok, thanks for the update on timing. Must have
been something else that caused single stepping to hang on me.
Or maybe I didn't have 20.0 for FPS when I had 0.05 for time steps.

[KnightErrant]

@GOM
Time steps that aren't float integers is causing Milkshape
to hang while loading. Went back to framenumbers and
FPS=1.0 and its working again. Did you get yours working
with noninteger time steps?

[GrumpyOldMan]

Hi KE

@GOM
Time steps that aren't float integers is causing Milkshape
to hang while loading. Went back to framenumbers and
FPS=1.0 and its working again. Did you get yours working
with noninteger time steps?

I sent a sample ms3d and an animmerge2.py to you by email, it still seems to work. I set the FPS to 20 and the frametimes were (frame_num+1)*0.05 - to catch the zero value at the beginning.

If you need to watch the animation slower for debugging, leave the FPS in the Preferences window and use Menu/Tools/Scale Animation. I usually factor it up by 10 to slow it down and factor it down again to get real time action.

I'd just like to add my voice to what should be thunderous applause, while I've been kerfuffling along you've got on with the job and come up with some great tools. Great work . Just going to try them on other stuff and see if I can break 'em .

Cheers

GrumpyOldMan

[Bwian]

KE ... please slap me if I am asking a stooopid question ... but can I edit the actual raw CAS animation files in MS3D, or should I be looking at the 'official' CAS tool released by CA earlier on ? I am more at home using that to mess with RTW anims ...and would like to use it for this..but I don't know if I am going to introduce nasty issues if I do. Everything else is going swimmingly.

Your tool handles non-standard animations fine, and converts them over to the new skeleton with very little fuss. If I wanted to make a custom animation for a custom skeleton...how would that work? Not in Max I suspect ...so I wanted to know of there is an MS3D or Max tool or part of the current toolsets that would help.

I wanted to try adding a 'tail' to a human skeleton...and animate that. Just don't know where to start!

[KnightErrant]

Hi all,

GOM helped me find my error so now I can set FPS and have it work
right in Milkshape.

@Bwian
From GrumpyOldMan's post in the animations thread he could add bones
and animate them by string name so it should work. Not familiar with
CA's tool. I'm still a novice at animating in Milkshape but I think that
would work. Question is what happens if you pull in a 20 bone animation
with animmerge, THEN add a tail bone. Does it put in N frames of
null animation for that bone which you can then edit in the keyframer
or does it just keep that bone with zero animation frames. Don't know how
you tell Milkshape you want to create frames for a single bone.

What I'm getting at is animextract as it stands now would probably work
right if you could get the same number of frames for each bone because it
reads the joint data in the ms3d file but it ignores any bone with
'weapon' or 'shield' in its name (no anims for these). Only problem I
see, and its a small one, is that I hard-coded the hierarchy tree for
humans into the extractor. I just need to make this a filechooser
pop-up to let you pick a standard hierarchy tree or a new one with an extra
bone. I need to solve this problem to do mounts and other non-human
anims anyway.

By hierarchy tree I mean the entries near the top of the .cas file that
look like this (when pulled out to decimal):

21 
0   0   1   2   3   1   5   6   7   7   6   10  11  12  6   14  15  16  1   18  19

This does the parent/child relationship for bones. Presumably a tail bone
would come from bone_pelvis so it would be a 1 appended onto the end
of this and that's the new hierarchy tree.

If you try adding the bone after merging with a walk animation or something,
e-mail me the .ms3d file. I'd love to look at the joints section to see what
it did.