Biped Character Animation without Character Studio
Community Forums/Showcase/Biped Character Animation without Character Studio
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| These are a couple of animations I made in 3ds max, without using Character Studio. I've never had much luck with CS exports, and wanted to make sure that the orientations of the limbs all stay the same. http://www.leadwerks.com/walk.zip The walk animation looks pretty much like motion capture. The feet are easy to keep in one place if you just position the whole model each frame so that the foot doesn't move. The jump animation needs more work, but I didn't want to spend a lot of time on it right now. I know this isn't the "right" way to do it, but there are three things to consider. 1) I've seen virtually no character animations in Blitz at all, by anyone. 2) They only have to be made once. 3) It looks damn good. Weighing a mesh onto a skeleton is no big deal. Maybe if a few of us work on this, we can make a full set of anims. An easy way to do it is to take the Half-Life SDK and use the animations as a reference to copy frame-by-frame. These anims were made from scratch, but I think I would need some kind of reference to make a running animation. If you delete all the keys in either anim, the figure will be standing at attention, with all joints rotated to 0,0,0. |
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| There is plenty of character animation in the feebs :P The walk looks nice |
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| Yeah, nice tennis ball with legs. |
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| AJ is a human tho, the only balls he has are, well you know |
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| The walk animation looks pretty much like motion capture. It is either "motion captured" animation or it isn't.. there is no in-between.. |
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| It is either "motion captured" animation or it isn't.. there is no in-between.. Umm... motion captured animation is... god this sounds patronising... animation data captured from a real actual human. Its done with a series of infra-red cameras in a studio like this, and with people dressed like this.I think Halo was suggesting that his model (which looks fairly good, if a little 'mechanical') was hand-animated. |
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| I had a look at it, not to bad, nor to special - but certainly nothing that hasn't been done in Blitz3d a million times over; as the post suggests it hasn't.. |
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| If it has, I haven't seen it. |
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| no offense but those animations are poor but then again those would be the beginning of basic animations and from there you would build on them ie add hip lift and shoulder swaying. Animation is hard work and needs lots of practice and can ALWAYS be improved no matter how good you think it is. The best way is to build a framework like the animations above and improve them until a certain point then start again from scratch to get practice. |
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| I thought the walk looked pretty good, and I am going to tend to be very critical of it. It's certainly comparable to UT2003. I think the jump needs some work, but I don't really know what a person jumping should look like. I've made running and strafing animations as well. Show me something better. |
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| "I thought the walk looked pretty good, and I am going to tend to be very critical of it. It's certainly comparable to UT2003." i haven't looked at the ut2003 animations closely but to be honest those animations are way too robotic and basic of yours. "I think the jump needs some work, but I don't really know what a person jumping should look like. " yeah jumps are tricky, so many ways to jump, thats why i'd video a friend/me doing them how i want them and work of the clips. |
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| Don't know where to start really, it's just a similar walk to the default biped walk. But the biped dafult is better becasue it plants its heel first, not the flat foot.( heel plant, lift) Its basically no where near UT2003 standard.( though its a good starting point). it doesn't loop either. unless you you chop off the first 7 frames and then animate it in place I hate to keep knocking you halo , but you keep making these outrageous statements.I suggest if you are serious about animation you get a book called 'The animators survival kit' by richard williams. Lot of game industry animators use this as reference here is one I am working on for the lawdogs mod at PU http://www.planetunreal.com/pearman/personalsite/test.avi perhaps too much head movement, but looking ok |
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| I'm not saying it's totally finished, I just don't understand how it is so horrible? The heel doesn't plant first? That's pretty easy to fix. Of course it doesn't loop! He's starting from a standing position. If you delete the first half-cycle of frames, it loops perfectly. What I'm saying is with a little work, this could be a really complete set of quality animations. I haven't had time to perfect them, but you're picking out little details and dismissing the whole thing based on that. |
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| Sorry for the double post This might help anyone who is looking to do some animation walk cycles( myself included) One thing I agree with you on halo is that you don't need biped to produce good walk cycles, fk can produce nice results too. In my last job the animator was using default 3dsmax 3 bones with no ik and producing amazing stuff. http://www.spicycricket.com/SCA/hello.html |
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| I've seen virtually no character animations in Blitz at all, by anyone. http://www.freewebs.com/smiff/b3danimations.htm Its quite easy getting CS animations from Max to Blitz using Valve's SMD exporter. You really are doing it the difficult way ! If you have any character studio animated models you want converted to .B3d just let me know. I'll be happy to oblige. |
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| This is absolutely, completely, utterly useless: Using Psionics Ninja Model and based on the original Quake animations by Paul Steed. |
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| Yes - it is useless - its just a demo of getting CS animations into Blitz which you seem to find difficult ! I'll withdraw my offer to convert any models for you as you are obviously too far up your own a%$e to realise when someone is trying to help ! |
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| You posted animations copyrighted by id Software. How is that useful for anything? |
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| You posted animations copyrighted by id Software. How is that useful for anything? The .bip files are freely available to download from PlanetQuake. These are test characters I made while investigating the best method of exporting Biped/Physique animation to Blitz. As you can see the results are good but would be a good example of why vertex weighting would be a welcome addition to Blitz3d. You said that you had difficulty exporting CS animated models to Blitz - I posted a link to my test characters so you could see the results of using the SMD exporter to convert to .b3d with all animation intact. I don't intend for you to use the animations other than for educational or reference means. I offered to convert any Character Studio animated models you may have now or in the future to the .b3d format. If you are using Max to animate and you have Character Studio then it makes very good sense to use this to create your Character animation rather than just skin and bones. There are so many options in CS that even the most talentless of animators - of which I am proud to be a member - can produce very good results. The possibilities of sharing and merging animation between models and the importing of mo-cap data makes it very powerful. I'm sorry if you found my post absolutely, completely and utterly useless but, there again, that's what some people say about Cshop3 ! - I'm not one of them mind ! ;) |
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| Okay, it's definitely good to have a route from Character Studio to Blitz, but that still doesn't get us any further if we have no original animations. I meant that the animations there are completely useless. |
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| 70 % of industry character "animation" is merely done with MoCAp |
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| 66% of all car accidents happen within five miles of the home. |
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| 92% of the population dont believe in statistics |
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| Forget the statistics you guys (lol)... Back to reality! I have Max 5.1 and Character Studio 3.x. I do not know how to get the stuff I can achieve in Max (which is not that good yet) into B3d. I am very interested in this process which Smiff has brought to my attention (Thanks Smiffy!). Where can I get the SMD convertor please? regards, IPete2. |
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| ..and never shake a baby. IPete2 I've been finding it a battle sorting an easy, rapid and unified character animation workflow for Blitz as well (as a complete animation newbie). It seems that whatever workflow/software you use, there's always a catch - either in the speed of setting up/animating a character, part name labels being recorded, tranferring animations between models, having good ik, avoiding random crashes, slow preview speed or just getting a 100% accurate conversion to Blitz (scale/rotation/boned movement/..) without resorting to time wasting workarounds. |
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| I am just sticking with md2 for the time being, its easy to export and animates smoothly.I am aware of the limitation of the format, but until b3d stops annoying me I will stick with it. The flow for b3d: export as smd from max, (reference pose and skeletal animation). Import smd in to MS3d. MS3d adds a null keyframe at the start. Export as a b3d file. Extract animation sequence in blitz . This is where I fall down, because the animation is just not cycling properly. There is a distinct jerk at the start, even if get rid of frame0( null frame). MD2 on the other hand is smooth as you like. |
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