Animation Tutorial

[miro42]

I know settoken started doing a super supermodel and we haven't heard anything from him in a little while and then sithspecter did his wonderful Revan Flowing Robes mod but are there any tuts out there explaining how all this was done? I know the supermodels control the animations and that's really about as far as I've gone. How does all this work? If you are still out there and have the time, sithspecter, do you think you could write a tutorial on how you did everything with your Revan mod? This is something that is truly exciting to me as an animator and even a push in the right direction just to get me started would be awesome.

[redrob41]

I sent Sithspecter a PM last year, and this is what I got back:

Hello, Redrob! Awhile back, you asked me about character animation, so I'm finally getting around to telling you. Anyway, let me get started...

 

Alright, to get a character imported with animations, you have to do quite a few things. First, extract the character model, and read and write with MDLOPs 6.1. If it has any animations, they will be there, and you won't have to import a supermodel. After read and write, open up NWMax, and import your charater with Geom+Animations. Now, if he has any animations, you're good to animate, but if it's missing, find the aurora base, and find the super field. Whatever it says there (with the exception of human skeleton characters) will be what you import. Extract that model, and read and write with MDLOps. Next, click on your aurora base of the character in NWMax, browse at the import screen to find your supermodel, and then hit import anims only. That should do it for non-human skeletons. For human, you have to extract and read and write all five supermodels, s_female01 through 02, and s_male01-03. Once that is done, import one of the supers to your model. Next, use the anim mapper to import the rest of them. It takes a LONG time to import all of these, but once you're done, you have completely editable anims now. That means we can fix Bastila's and Juhani's clothes, and all kinds of stuff. You can also add new animations, but that would obviously take a lot of time. That's it in a nutshell, if you need any more questions answered, feel free to ask.

I was thinking of adding animations to the yoda model, but I got overwhelmed and stopped. I never did give it another try, but hopefully Sithspecter's sage advice can help you get started Miro

[Quanon]

Woot, Redrob thank you for sharing this!

 

^_^ I'll copy this info into a text file, if I do find some free time to spend on this.

 

I'll try to put this in steps, like with Setto's method for hex editing.

I think this might help out for the Alien thing for J7.

[miro42]

Awesome. So if I'm understanding this right then on the humans you import the female animations even if it's a male character? The reason I ask is when I import both male and female something goes wonky with model. However, if I use just one sex then everything is golden. Maybe I'm using the Anim Mapper wrong. I don't know since I never even knew that tool existed.

 

Oh and how could I forget to say thanks redrob! You rock!

 

Okay, this might be a silly question, but when I'm going through the Anim Browser how do I get back out into the master world where I can go through all animations?

[Quanon]

Hmm, if you got 3Ds Max, you might want to check its help!

 

Its a pretty good one, compared to other programs

[DarthParametric]

That means we can fix Bastila's and Juhani's clothes

I assume he is referring to clipping during animations? I know Bastila's default clothes front skirt does this during her idle standing animation. I would assume that the fix is to replace them with other existing animations, as manually adjusting them would be time consuming.

[miro42]

Hmm, if you got 3Ds Max, you might want to check its help!

 

Its a pretty good one, compared to other programs

 

Well, the animation browser is from NWMax so it shouldn't be in the 3dsMax help file, right? And doing a search for it in the help file brought up nothing. Is NWMax based off of 3dsMax? Meaning, could the same function be found in 3ds but under a different name? I'm still relatively new to 3ds and completely new to the animations part of it, so maybe I'm just overlooking something.

 

EDIT: I'm sending a PM to sithspecter, but I want to ask out in the open as well. I'm working on the Twilek dancers because those animations are absolutely horrible. It must have been animated by white guys. Anyhoo, before I got too heavy into changing some animations I decided I'd do an export to see if it would even work. So I went through MDLOps (which might be the mistake) and in game the Twilek just stands at her base pose. The head continues to move, which I thought odd. Aren't the Twilek's one model? So, if anyone knows the proper way to export, whether it needs some hex editing, replacer, whatever that'd be awesome.