Animation Problems

I've just spent the last 24 hours, trying to get a model to be modified to my liking and got some success in the process, but the animation just looks so wrong, and that was following a tutorial.

All I needed was, the player model to run/stand/fly (by moving legs back slightly from standing & have his arms move (not so hard?), I also needed to alter a pre-existing model, because I know my limitations and modeling a human form is quite beond my skills.

Why is it, so hard to have a ready made animated joint/bones that you can just attach a mesh to, esp. for a human, should be the same basic bones for all shouldn't?, so why not have the animated so that (morons like me) can just glue a mesh to the bones.

I was using md2's before I started looking into changing my player to look a bit more like the guy in the game, I am remaking, http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=228 .

I also have other worrys too like what happens when the animation state changes from running to flying for example, do the frames just snap to the fly mode with no soft smooth transition (bit like md2).

Ultimately I'm just so very confused as to why nothing I'm doing is working right, perhaps it's because I'm a coder not an 3d artest, I could get away with simple stuff, it reminds me why I stopped programming in blitz3d for aboat a year. anyway, enough ramble.

What Animatoin App did you use?

If you load a textured and animated model in 3ds max, you can remove and reposition planes and vertices using the EditMesh Modifier. This will keep UV Coodrs intact. But as soon as you use stuff like Compound Object (boolen subtraction etc.), things go mad and you'll have to remap the thing, which is the heaviest work IMHO.

Personally I prefere to use CharacterFX for Character Animation, but watch out, Pacemaker has just been released! (See Blitz Discussion Forum)And it's Freeware Version even handles up to 1500 Tris. It's used to make Bones based Animations, using the .B3D Format.

Basicly you need to assign all Vertices to a bone. In the lates Version of blitz the vertices can have a relative connection to the bone (and to multiple bones), this is giving more flexibility, but it also complicates things a bit.

Creating Animations using keyframe interpolation is something that requires some experience. You have to study human motion. If you find some soccer slowmotion avis with people running from left to right, the watch it closely.

Halo and me we once tried to start an Animation pool, but it died due to low activity. Now halo was anouncing a new tool he's gonna release, that will be able to add animation to models, just the thing you are after.

Anyway, when you are fit with CharacterFX, one loop such as "walking" may take 1 hour of work or so.

I was using milkshape I did obtain a walk of some discription except when the animation looped it didn't loop properly acording the material I was reading, even copying the 100th key frame to the 1st frame didn't do anything at all, that took me about 15mins.

I've looked a CFx, it looks very complicated, more so than milkshape.

soccer slowmotion avis from search from google, found his homepage but the avis don't seam to exist anymore.

CFX is easier IMHO. I only use Milkshape to convert Models.

In CFX you need to import a Mesh. Then Create the Skeleton. Then assign the vertices to the bones. usually you would assin all vertices of the lower arm to the ellbow bone (which is the lower arm bone, but it's pivot center is the ellbow, the connection to the next bone in the hierarchy). So when you rotate the lower arm, the vertices of the lower arm will follow.

It may take some time until you're familar with the controls of CFX, eg. Select and unselect Vertives using shift, alt and ctrl combinations (tho it's written at the bottom). If you have once assigned the vertives to the bones properly, the fun begins.
Animation Keyframing etc. is a nice Job imho, compared to Vertex assignement.

BTW. I wouldn't use 100 frame sfor a walking cylce. 20 or 30 works pretty good for me.
Probably I'll write a lil tutorial soonish. Tho I am not Mr. Animation or something.

(BTW it might be a good idea to set the very first frame of a cycle sequence to be a keyframe for EVERY bone/part of the model, to make sure it will loop correctly)

jfk

I prefer to assign the vertices to the bones in MilkShape and then to export the file to CFX for animation.
MilkShape being more user friendly , in my opinion, as far as vertex assignement is concerned.
Any drawback in your opinion ?

thanks in advance

No. I am not very familar with milkshape, but I believe, it's a pretty good tool.

@Inner - wrote a littel tutorial about walking cycles, hope it's gonna be useful:

http://www.melog.ch/tutorial/walkcycle/

I'm with Alberto on assigning vertices in Milkshape and then exporting Milkshape ASCII to CharacterFX. Although Milkshape doesn't support blended vertex weights so you can't set those up outside CharacterFX. You would have to tweak the vertex assignments in CharacterFX, so for that it might be easier to just rig the model in CharacterFX.