Anavel Gato Posted August 8, 2002 Share Posted August 8, 2002 I am sure that Raven will release a tool that allows editing and creation of animations. The length of the period that a game stays popular and therefor sells depends for a large part on available MODs it's MOD-making community. I'm sure that Raven/LucasArts realises this. Besides that has anybody ever emailed somebody at Raven about this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MacD Posted August 8, 2002 Share Posted August 8, 2002 Anavel, don't forget making a new animations.cfg file to go with the new .gla file... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anavel Gato Posted August 8, 2002 Share Posted August 8, 2002 Good 1 MacD. I would have forgotten that 1 I'm gonna try some things out this weekend. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goreld Posted August 8, 2002 Share Posted August 8, 2002 Originally posted by Anavel Gato Motion capture isn't ideal either because the raw data you get from it still needs some fine-tuning. You can create equally good animations by keyframing them manually. You "just" need the skills, patience and time to learn it as with anything else. Motion capture is used a lot for a large quantity of needed animations like for large crowds in movies where they don't want everybody to walk, run fight etc. the same way. Is it possible to: - Make animations of the skeleton in 3D Studio Max. - Export is as XSI and compile a GLA of it in Carcass. - Compile a finished XSI model in Carcass that uses the newly compiled GLA instead of the _humanoid.gla. - In ModView you should be able to see if the model uses the new animation. You could try this with a single, short and easy animation to see if it works. For instance the skeleton kicking itself in the head which is only 2 keyframes Maybe I'll give that a shot this weekend. Just wondering why you have to use Softimage but I'm probably missing some small & important detail Sorry, but good luck animating a guy swinging a lightsaber WITHOUT mo-cap. The patience it takes, as well as the skills, to make that look good go through the roof! If you don't believe me, go attempt it yourself. Especially the what? 17,000 frames of animation? Hint: many people spend many months animating an animated short that's around 3 minutes long. That's 180 frames of animation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anavel Gato Posted August 8, 2002 Share Posted August 8, 2002 17,000 frames of animation seems like a huge amount but it's not that bad. I'm guessing but Raven probably had 12 to 18 months of development time for JK2 and 1 good animator (and they must have very skilled people) can do this in that period of time. Somebody who is skilled at animating can make a guy swinging a lightsaber look just as good as the animations in JK2. These 17.000 frames also include all animations for the cutscenes. For a MOD you wouldn't need this amount of animations My animation experience is limited and I wouldn't be able to do this. I just wanna try out if you can get self-made animations to work in JK2. I'm just gonna make 1 or 2 really simple animation sequences for this test. Maybe a nice "bump&grind" move for my padme model Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Major Clod Posted August 8, 2002 Share Posted August 8, 2002 Sorry, but good luck animating a guy swinging a lightsaber WITHOUT mo-cap. The patience it takes, as well as the skills, to make that look good go through the roof! If you don't believe me, go attempt it yourself. Especially the what? 17,000 frames of animation? Hint: many people spend many months animating an animated short that's around 3 minutes long. That's 180 frames of animation. Mate, so many games have great animations and don't use motion capture. Besides, using motion capture for games isn't exactly the be all and end all of creating animations. Games require every animation to be completely chainable with every other animation, so that all the movement is smooth. With motion capture, each animation has to be tuned anyway so that it flows with the other perfectly. You don't think the motion capture actor could do twenty different transition animations, each one ending up in exactly the same spot do you? Anyway, I think most people seem to be missing the point of this thread! The ability to create new animations would be for those models that are not of the biped nature, that do not have anything to do with the original raven animations. They will be used for mods, not player models! And this whole, "as if you are going to create 17000 frames of animation" thing is really starting to piss me off. If you are making a freaking mod, with a creature such as a rancor, why the hell would it need to have 17000 frames? It can be perfectly usable with generic run, walk, pain and idle animations, and a few different death animations thrown in for variety. And to all you motion capture lovers, where exactly do you think you are going to get a rancor to jump in to the studio and whip up a couple of animations for you? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kinja Posted August 8, 2002 Author Share Posted August 8, 2002 Hehe, exactly:smirk2: Although, I will have all Humanoind charachters in my mod, and weopons like Swords and nun Chucks which will be even harder than the mystical lightsaber to animate IMO. The point is, don't underestimate the power of good old fasioned Keyframe animation. Most of my friends in the animating circle practically despise mocap. Theres just not that much of an art too it. Its kinda like this, its like Final Fantasy the movie was cool, but it would have been alot cooler if it hadn't been so damn realistic. Know what I mean? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
agentj64 Posted August 8, 2002 Share Posted August 8, 2002 hrm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KMan Posted August 24, 2002 Share Posted August 24, 2002 Quick update to you all. XSI/Softimage Demo version is now available This should give a much needed boost to creating your own sets of animations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emon Posted August 24, 2002 Share Posted August 24, 2002 Just to let everyone know, most of JO's saber animations were done by hand. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Jolts Posted August 24, 2002 Share Posted August 24, 2002 "Sorry, but good luck animating a guy swinging a lightsaber WITHOUT mo-cap. The patience it takes, as well as the skills, to make that look good go through the roof! If you don't believe me, go attempt it yourself. Especially the what? 17,000 frames of animation? Hint: many people spend many months animating an animated short that's around 3 minutes long. That's 180 frames of animation." Remember 17,000 running at 30 frames per second. In school we were given a month to model/setup and animate a 30 second animation piece. 17,000 frames sounds like a lot, but its not. A huge chunk of the animation in jo is cutscene stuff. It's not hard to do 30 frame walk or run cycle. The hardest part of animating is having good timing/interesting key poses. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dark Cloak Posted August 25, 2002 Share Posted August 25, 2002 I'm still under the impression that the hardest part of creating new animations would be getting them into the actual game...actually doing them doesn't seem all that difficult, just as long as you know what you're doing. And Emon, when you say "done by hand", do you mean that the lightsaber animations were done with keyframes with a mouse? I'm not a modeling and animation guru so I was wondering if that's correct? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Jolts Posted August 25, 2002 Share Posted August 25, 2002 hand animation... at frame 1 you bend your character in to crouched position and key frame the joints. Move the slider to frame 5 and put your character into new position and key freame it, pose to pose to pose. Motion capture.... put guy in a suit covered in little glitter balls and let him dance the tango in a ring of cameras capturing the data from each ball. Take that data and attach it to a skeleton, smooth out any corrupt data, holes in the animation where maybe a hand or leg covered up a ball left a gap in the animation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KMan Posted August 25, 2002 Share Posted August 25, 2002 And that is why you use IK on the joints. It really isn't hard for an experienced animator to do new animations by hand. Yes, it is time consuming, but since getting access to a mocap studio (a good one, or you might as well just do them by hand) is either very difficult or expensive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UniKorn Posted August 26, 2002 Share Posted August 26, 2002 Hi all, first of all, the thread about me stating that we might switch to another engine is indeed true. We are still discussing it, and I am looking at the implications of it all. But when I looked at these posts, I think I misread a lot of stuff. If I am understanding this correctly, this means that we can build our own animations, but that we cannot use the ones Raven created and add a few new animations to it? It will mean more work for the modellers if we have to start from scratch on it, but that then just have to be the case. If my statement here is correct, please confirm it. It would not force us to switch to another engine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dreamer Posted August 26, 2002 Share Posted August 26, 2002 UniKorn I think it's the other way around, you can only ADD animation to the existing humanoid and recompile it, but u cannot make a completely new one, correct me if I'm wrong cuz thats wut I understand from the posts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MacD Posted August 26, 2002 Share Posted August 26, 2002 So what's Raven's latest word about this? Appart from having to d/l a 650 mb file to compile and changing the animations.cfg... Who has Raven's ear? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ialexeev Posted August 26, 2002 Share Posted August 26, 2002 Guys, i was just wondering if its possible to rip animations out of new SW Galaxies game!? They have a whole bunch of new anims there for both double and single bladed lightsabers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KMan Posted August 26, 2002 Share Posted August 26, 2002 Originally posted by ialexeev Guys, i was just wondering if its possible to rip animations out of new SW Galaxies game!? They have a whole bunch of new anims there for both double and single bladed lightsabers. I highly doubt it. For one, a different company is making that game. Also it has not been released yet. In addition, they would never release any source material for a MMORPG for many security issues. And lastly they are using a completely different rendering engine and probably their own animation setup as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xenoeye Posted August 27, 2002 Share Posted August 27, 2002 Im totally lost now:confused: It wasn't long ago people were saying that animations couldn't be done without some input from Raven into the community. Forget the motion capture crap cause its just not feasible for an amature project. (by amature I mean the project is just for fun, Im not commenting on the work you guys produce because some of the guys posting here have made some great stuff for JK2) What is it that you think can and cant be done? Will you be able to edit the humanoid animations? Will you be able to make totally new ones? It doesn't seem like Im the only who needs this clarification either so some answers would be appreticated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emon Posted August 27, 2002 Share Posted August 27, 2002 Well, NickR has been going around the coding forum bragging about how he got the source animation data from Raven. It would greatly benefit the community and prolong the life of the game if he released it, but I think he'd rather go around and brag about how great he is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
agentj64 Posted August 27, 2002 Share Posted August 27, 2002 Uhm I'd like to boast that I DID get animations in game and working fine:)... Screw Raven's input, I think I'll find more help from a tree stump. "So why multiple IK FK solutions? I mean can't we just use damn goals?" (wind noise) "Not the talkative type ayhe?" (birp poop falls on my head) Yes people..yes obviously we have learned something! sigh :0 http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=74016 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dark Cloak Posted September 5, 2002 Share Posted September 5, 2002 *ka-BLINKS* Did you now? Wait...did I miss something? How did you get the animations working, and did you manage to get them in-game, Agentj64? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-wT- Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 If anyone's interested, the Maya version of the XSI exporter is now available as a public beta, from softimage.com Too bad you need to compile it yourself before you can use it... but atleast now there's a plugin for a software that has better animation tools and lower price than Max Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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