Revae on 17/7/2014 at 20:14
Quote Posted by PinkDot
...my next milestone is a working import/export with an IK/FK rig, so basically I want to show something useable at that stage
Man, it'd be awsome if you'd release info/tools on that when you get it working. It's be great to smooth out the animations thief has on higher poly models. Animate fingers/facial expressions... Fix floating feet...
Wonder if it'd be possible to tie jaw rotation to speech volume similar to half life 1... Anyway... One thing at a time...
nemyax on 17/7/2014 at 20:22
Quote Posted by Revae
Animate fingers/facial expressions...
Not gonna happen, unfortunately. The character articulation is set in stone.
Revae on 17/7/2014 at 22:05
Well looking at the joint planes they have fingers and toes listed separately... If all that is being changed is the weights/animation you could control them to open and close all at once, and use the toe plane for a proper footroll.
I just started looking into this today, but it seems like you could at least squeeze a bit more out of it (assuming it works anything like normal joint chains - but again. Super new).
It'd be nice to get proper joint rigs working in game, but that'd require working with the source I imagine. Hopefully newdark dev didn't just call it quits. :-p
PinkDot on 18/7/2014 at 19:32
The animation system in Dark engine is very rigid. It's tailored and optimized for the needs of Thief from 15 years ago. No joint can be added, without changing the code.
The only thing that potentially can be (slightly) improved is weighing vertices to bones. I mean it can be done more preciesly, but we are still limited to 2 bones per vertex only....
R Soul on 18/7/2014 at 20:13
Quote Posted by Revae
Well looking at the joint planes they have fingers and toes listed separately...
That's mainly for attachment purposes (e.g. a guard could have a lantern attached to his left fingers joint). For a swordsman, the right fingers joint is used when checking for a successful strike against the enemy.
Revae on 19/7/2014 at 06:55
Quote Posted by R Soul
That's mainly for attachment purposes (e.g. a guard could have a lantern attached to his left fingers joint). For a swordsman, the right fingers joint is used when checking for a successful strike against the enemy.
Couldn't you just attach those things at the base of the fingers, and animate them to be shut? You'd need to alter the object to match, but if you're remodeling characters it's not that outlandish. Just curious. really the foot rolls would be the coolest bit, and would help to make the AI feel grounded in the world.
PinkDot on 19/7/2014 at 09:19
Quote Posted by Revae
Couldn't you just attach those things at the base of the fingers, and animate them to be shut? You'd need to alter the object to match, but if you're remodeling characters it's not that outlandish. Just curious. really the foot rolls would be the coolest bit, and would help to make the AI feel grounded in the world.
You really need some more bones to get any decent looking deformation of the fingers, not just wrist joint and top of the fingers joint. Clever skinning won't help.
And with the dark engine's concept of torsos and limbs, where only torsos can have more than one joint attached to, you can't really have a palm with a number of fingers. Torsos can be attached to torsos only....
It's a shame, but to get characters up to nowadays standards in Thief, the entire animation system would have to be re-written from scratch.
We still can fix the floating feet though. However they won't bend at the base of toes - they can pivot only on the heel and tip of the toes.
Aminosav on 15/8/2014 at 11:31
bentraxxx did a great job with the thief 1,2 hd mod
Nameless Voice on 6/10/2014 at 11:29
Did anything ever happen with the 3DSMax motion editing?
PinkDot on 6/10/2014 at 12:34
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
Did anything ever happen with the 3DSMax motion editing?
This is still in development. I know it's taking nearly two years now since the announcement, but I no longer have as much time as I used to.
By no means it's dead however - I even did some coding yesterday! :)
Just to give you an update, what has been done in the meantime:
1) a full IK/FK blend rig has been built (as opposed to a simplistic FK rig previously)
2) flags can be edited now too
3) I'm working on exporter at this moment
4) motion loading has been improved. previously it was loading mirrored poses (left side swapped with the right one)
5) a few smaller improvements to the UI
What's causing the delay is that the motions still do not import correctly. While overall animations look good, it seems like there's some weird things happening with arms - they don't get correct rotations. The same issue happens actually in Weyoun's Motion Editor, which until recently, I thought was interpreting motions perfectly. ME editor also imports motions mirrored, but this is fixed in my tools now.
I might throw in some pictures and maybe more details on the issue - maybe somebody has a better idea on what to look for?
