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Re: Loki files for banruptcy protection.
Chris Purnell wrote:
>
> On Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 03:35:40PM -0500, Steve Baker wrote:
>
> > But I don't regard the animation part as the biggest issue (maybe I'm just
> > tri-talented and can do the animation part OK) - the 3D model and 2D texture
> > origination is the big deal for me - and I don't see a way to automate that
> > because it's "artistic" in nature.
>
> Animation may not seem like as big an issue to you but it is a real show
> stopper if you don't have any. I've been trying to piece together an
> idea of mine using artwork from the Internet. There are 3D models and
> 2D textures out there. Even stuff that is usable, copyright, Poly-count
> etc. But I've yet to find any animation data I can use. And trying
> to do the animation myself has been almost as big a disaster as
> designing a character model myself. So things kind of stalled around
> November. And having a character inanimately glide around the the
> landscape looks so crap I've not been able to bring myself to release
> what I've done so far.
Have you played with my 'ExPoser' program? It's not (yet) all that great,
but it's free, and runs under Linux or Windoze - and my son was able to
produce believable walk/run/die/jump/kick moves using it in not too much
time.
It's really easy to add a skeleton to any 3D model you happen to have
lying around - just add some 3D lines to the model - one for each bone...
make sure they join up - and make the 'root' bone be coloured red so
ExPoser knows it's special.
We found walking and running was hardest - I found some short movies of
real people walking and running in perfect side-on-view on some 'biometrics'
web sites and it was quite simple to step through those frame-by-frame
and copy the joint angles. Having gotten a basic walk and run cycle, it
was quite easy to fiddle with them to make them more interesting. I've
been playing with 'climbing a ladder' and 'swimming' (both of which I need
for my new game). Practice *definitely* helps...having a better tool
would probably help more - and I'm working on that now. :-)
We've also made dinosaurs and cartoon-style dogs do some quite complicated
'canned' moves. My kid is now trying to use ExPoser to do some facial expressions...
but I have my doubts as to how useful that is in *simple* games of the kind
I can write in finite amounts of time!
ExPoser exports either the sets of joint angles for a skeletal animation - or
it'll pre-deform your model into a set of key-frames that can be 'tweened'
very efficiently using PLIB's new 'ssgTween' node type. I had 100 humans
running through randomly ordered move sequences at about 50Hz on a GeForce-2
with a 850MHz CPU - which is about all I need for my next game I think.
ExPoser is available from the PLIB web site (http://plib.sf.net) - look under
"Demos" somewhere there - it's GPL'ed.
At SigGraph last week, I bought two really good books for animation beginners
by George Maestri called "[digital] CHARACTER ANIMATION 2" - volumes 1 and 2.
They have a gazillion suggestions and practical advice which are probably just
laughably obvious to the experts out there - but which seem very useful to me.
(Things like - "Your characters' feet have to bend in the middle" - which wasn't
obvious to me until it was pointed out)
It also contains some .AVI's of walk, run, skip, sneak and other interesting
animations. Unfortunately, those are both $50 books...but I think they are
worth it. Get Vol.1 first and see if you like it before splurging on Vol.2.
----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
HomeMail : <sjbaker1@airmail.net> WorkMail: <sjbaker@link.com>
HomePage : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
Projects : http://plib.sf.net http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
http://prettypoly.sf.net http://tuxkart.sf.net
http://freeglut.sf.net http://toobular.sf.net