WorldForge Community

The texturing looks great!

Don't forget that avatars are usually rendered quite small on the screen, so it is not necessary to worry too much about the find detail.

Have you managed to find out any information about what is required to get your work into the game?

Yes, but putting this model into game doesn't have a lot of sense - it can't be skinned properly(i've tried but animations were broken).
Already skinned and animated human model with armature is needed as a reference (all clothes must use the same skeleton).
I've talked to jayr(mason human model creator), he said that all of the human models he have, are already in repo, unfortunately they don't have animations(only geometry and skeleton - which is old and unused).

[IMG]http://i53.tinypic.com/2rcmz5c.png[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i53.tinypic.com/11snmyv.png[/IMG]
This is my last model.

Very nice model! So you were never able to get the skeleton for the existing Human model?

I did a review a while back of the original files including the XSI ones and I found a number of the models with animations where missing the tracks they exhibit in binary format. Not sure what happened to them, but honestly there is not so much animation work done that it would be a huge loss to simply replace them and move forward.

Perhaps we need to just bite the bullet and decide on a new standardized rig which can be the base for all future humanoid animations and then remap the existing human over to it and move forward. I'd love to help, and I plan to start doing some custom motion capture and animations for the project in the future but I'm on hold waiting for a new exporter which I'm hoping will give more reliable results, the current one is just too frustrating.

I'd love to see your clothes in game on a fully animating model, as they look terrific!

I think that your suggestion is most reasonable. We should just move forward.

There are plenty of motion capture databases on the web.
I was thinking about using resources from this site:
http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu
to create some basic animations.
But that were just a plans.

I decided to post to the mailing list about the Standardized Rig idea so that all those on the project can add some input, not everyone visits the forums, if we can get a good Rig decided upon/built we could begin moving forward with things. Animation is something I've wanted to work on for some time but my broken exporter has been holding me back, if I can provide the sequences for you as you appear to be using a modeller that is exporting Animations properly then we could make some good progress on that front. And it would be a great new addition to the system I think.

Maybe we should start with existing rig? Have you looked at it? I mean armature for
"malebase" model.
I don't have experience with animations so it's hard for me to judge if it is good.
But if i have to do rig for human it would look like that i've mentioned.

Yep I'm familiar with it, I think it would be a good start, but there are a few additions that I would like to make. Like adding hips, a few facial bones for mouth control, and eyes. As Erik suggested we need to be careful as to how many bones we have but I think it would also be a good thing to plan for all future needs to avoid having to rework and make changes later.

I'd like to get in touch with Jayr and get his thoughts, also I think I've located the 84 bone rig, but its in a format I can't process but I believe maybe he could. So I'd like to send him an email and see if he'd be interested in having input and direction at this stage, perhaps providing us with a rig we can use. There are also a number of other good rigs we could look at using too, a few I've looked at are really nice but perhaps have a few too many bones, but might work if altered a bit. Makehuman is one, also there is a group working on a gaming rig for Blender as well.

I have not heard from Jayr so I think we're going to have to work this out ourselves.

I've studied a good number of different rigs and methods for rigging and I think that for our needs working from the current Malebase rig is a good idea, it has all of the most important bones we would want, and it also has 23 helpers, bringing the total exported bones to 60.

Now that said... I feel that having nearly half the bones as non-deformable, when your using mocap to generate the bulk of body part animation doesn't seem like a good choice to me. If we want to minimize bones counts we have to begin with all un-necessary helpers. So I've decided to wipe all the current helpers. The takes the base mesh down to 37, and this is a very modest count by any standard for a humanoid. From that base count I have added 26 new bones that I'm testing currently, that still puts us around 20 bones less the current in game version, and also includes bones that Rig has.

This current 63 bones rig has Mouth, Eye bones for talking, smiling and expressions, It also includes a Nose bone and Ear Bones, I included these because there are potentially other future races besides humans who could use the rig which would be nice to have. Also two bones I discovered in Makehuman are Ribs/Chest (for breathing), and Abdomen which I felt would be good future additions and add alot of potential "Life" to a model for 2 bones added.

I did build a Rig with Fully Articulated Hands, this leads us up to 75 or so bones which is still less then the currently used Rig, and it is essentially Feature Complete for a game rig. I'm just not sure full hand articulation is something that is truly needed, but I can't help but think that it would be nice, and we are still lowering our count. I could potentially afford to add a few hand helpers, but I think I will avoid Head helpers because eventually Mocap will also handle general head movements and the smaller features really should be tweaked directly for best effect, Makehuman has a great facial feature system but the number of bones in that rig is totally huge, its meant strictly for film and not at all for game. With my current face bones I can easily make the male talk, smile and frown, look around and blink eyelids etc. I don't think we need to get too crazy with the face but just give it some life-like actions.

Motion Capture testing is going very well actually. I'm actually a bit surprised how well it all performs once you learn how to create a good environment and setup the software. Where I am running into problems is on exporting the Custom Rig back into Blender, there is some glitching happening on face and hands, possibly because they are non-normal, not assigned to anything mocap and I think it really comes down to the number of bones being very close together, or how I'm weighting them currently, I'm going to try some more tests and using painted weighting, and then talk with the Developer and see what he can suggest or might able to be done, but overall I'm very confident that I can achieve all major animation actions with mocap, and then just clean-up, and add Head and Hand articulation. Head mocap function is planned for the future too so eventually I'd only be doing Facial Features and Hand animations on top of the mocap. I just need to get a proper workflow in place, and I'm very close, in fact if not for the weighting on export issue I'd probably have new animation in game already.

I will put together a few showcase videos of what things so far, but all in all I think good progress is being made. The rig just needs to get finalized, I need to get more practiced and making the mocap, and then targeting it onto the custom rig.

If in the end we can't get a fully featured Rig going then we'll just have to work from a good solid base one, and as the software gets better we re-apply and add the new features. One of the nice things about the mocap software system I can very quickly apply any actions I record onto any rig quickly and easily, the big time is spent recording and targeting the initial captures, but once that is done the process of applying the data to a game rig is a matter of a couple minutes.

That's very good news!
I can't wait to see first fully animated model in action.

Its not far off now Raziel, I've got a good workflow settled on now, I am actually going to be creating a new section in Wiki to detail it completely. Here is the quick and dirty version...

- I record my mocap, I process/cleanup and divide into "Takes" to manage file size and workload.
- I have decided to use a Standardized BVH style rig as my custom export Rig from Mocap, this avoids the previous problem mentioned, it also means any Modelling software and also BVHacker can process cleanly the results.
- I import this Mocap-BVH into BVHacker and further cleanup and edit the takes into a Blender ready version of BVH, usually making them loop-able, removing offset, and locking the character into place at the root.
- Load up the "Blank Base" model and Game rig.
- I use MakeHuman's mocap tool plugin in Blender to import and retarget the mocap animation onto the Game Rig.
- Further cleanup is now needed to fix foot slide, MakeHuman provides a tool for that too, and also checking for body parts clipping into each other, adding detail work like hand/wrist movement etc.
- Turn the finished actions into Action Strips in the NLA, name appropriately and then export out the "Animated Base".

To create a new animated human or for clothing simply open the Blank Base file, delete that mesh, append your own, skin the rig onto that and export. Then modify the Mesh.xml file to point to the animated skeleton file. Alternately you can load and skin to the animated base and check results in Blender, but for the game meshes all can point to the same skeleton file.

The one remaining part of the puzzle is the Rig. I've gone back and forth on this one a great deal, I like and dislike various things about the ones I've worked on/with, but the good news is Jayr has gotten back to me and I hope to be able to discuss things with him in detail and get his input and aid on the Rig and animations.

Right now I'm basically working with MakeHumans Game Rig, for testing as its easier for me, but I still feel like it has too many Bones especially in the hands, Erik and I were discussing the use of Shape Keys or "Pose/Vertex Animation" as opposed to Bones for fine detail work like Breathing and Facial Animation. I am wondering if those would not work well to complete a few base hand bones to achieve a good effect. Each hand has 23 bones, plus 10 facial bones and 4 Helpers... all the rest of the Rig is 22 Bones which will provide the majority of major visible animation. And while the others do provide a nice effect and believe-ability or making animation work to a model easier it does carry a significant price in the game I think. I can basically grind the game to halt with a mass amount of animating humans on screen.

I'm hoping Jayr will be able to give some input and direction in creating a good standard rig as a base, and later we can work on adding details with Pose animation which I think might be more manageable then having a standard skeleton of 80+ bones on every humanoid displaying in the game.

So that's my latest update, and hopefully in the next one I'll have something useful to share in the form of an animating test rig for you, or atleast a video demonstration of the one to come.

Here is a picture of what I think would be a good starting point for a rig.

http://i1083.photobucket.com/albums/j388/demarii_wf/Rig_suggestion.png

Very minimal with only 42 bones total, 10 total per hand would I think accomplish most standard actions fairly well posing could be added as needed for special action, the jaw would be a simple talking bone with more articulation coming in the future with poses.

But perhaps that is too minimal. But I figure its a reasonable starting point.

With Jayr's direction the Rig has been refined down to 31 bones. Now the real work begins... :)

I've begun by adding the minimal worldforge rig to my makehuman mocap script so I can load bvh, retarget, and simplify without any warnings or errors.

Eventually I would like to submit the rig for inclusion to Makehuman as a very minimal rig, and potentially submit a proxy mesh as well. But that's for later consideration, there is lots of animation to get into Ember still, and a Wiki section to create.

My new model of bloomery, comments are highly welcome!
[IMG]http://i53.tinypic.com/1fgr2c.png[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i52.tinypic.com/332xans.png[/IMG]

Hi, this looks really good.

One thing you have to change though is to make it extend further down. All static structures that are intended to be put on uneven ground needs to have some extra geometry below their intended bottom. This is to avoid getting gaps when it's placed on uneven terrain.

You should get this into the svn repo.

This model looks fantastic! If we can get it into the Ember configuration I can definitely write some awesome gameplay around it, including the ability for player to build this structure themselves and use it for smelting.

The fact that players will be able to place this themselves does reinforce the importance of including a portion of the model that would normally be below the ground, to allow for slopes.

Thanks so much for posting this here.

Anvil:
[IMG]http://i54.tinypic.com/21d3c4z.png[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i52.tinypic.com/m7u8wl.png[/IMG]
It has 256x256 texture and looks a little bit plastic, but with less light it would be ok ;)

What about extending bloomery i've made nessesary corrections.

Iron ore - hematite, this one didn't look good but with low res texture it was a hard job for a beginner.
[IMG]http://i51.tinypic.com/20kc9s2.png[/IMG]

I proudly present iron smelting tool-kit :)
[IMG]http://i55.tinypic.com/2upycdi.jpg[/IMG]

Now I'm waiting for svn access to add all of this to repo.

Looking really good! We're working on getting you svn access. There are a couple of workarounds if we can't get it soon enough; one would be for you to send it to me, and I'll add it.

Very nice work Peter! I look forward to seeing it in the game and being able to perform crafting actions with it one day!

How is your progress with animations Dean?

Sorry for the late reply, I've been incredibly busy on a number of real life fronts here, busy season and such. Motion Capture I have a very good initial base of work, in regards to blender animation work I've got a number of base actions worked on but still need to work on cleaning up the parts not covered by mocap data.

Where I need to put my work towards now is the blender side of things, and I plan to as soon as my time frees up. I'm really hoping that the official exporter comes out soon because the other one is constantly changing and made previous attempts more difficult then I expected.

What version of Blender are you running with?

No problem Dean,
now i'm using the 2.6 blender but in general i use the latest one(yep, just to simplifiy your work :D ).
but if it is more convinient to you i can change version.

I'm in the middle of work on elven male.
That means more animation work for you Dean :D
[IMG]http://i40.tinypic.com/1z5rfia.jpg[/IMG]

Oh cool, I did not realize they had released 2.6 while I was away.

I just grabbed the latest versions of things, and tried an export using one of my old test works using the male base. It appears to be working fairly well. A few issues remain but I can clean those up with mesh magick I think.

That elf looks very good! And will look even better in the elven clothing you have designed too! I'm really looking forward to seeing it in game and moving about. Now you've got me inspired to get my butt back into Blender and get you some working results to try out!

The nice thing about the system I'm working on is to get your model fully animating in game all that is needed is to bind the model to the base skeleton and then just edit the mesh to reference the standard skeleton and it's fully animating. But if an artist wants to create a new custom skeleton or add/fix existing parts to the standard one they will have access of all the bvh's and also blender animation tracks.

I'll focus on getting the base, and a focused test version in your hands asap to look at. It will likely focus on just a base Idle, Walk, Run, and Pick-up animation to start, and as add to the standard every model will be able to make use of the new tracks. My plan is to create a good number of variants to every action so that they can be mixed and matched in the modeldef's to avoid everyone walking the same, moving the same etc, although it might make sense to eventually create a number of standards, like one for Old People, Children, Male and Female.

PS - I see you've gotten your SVN access which is great!

Unfourtunately, all clothes was for ember base model, elf has slightly other proportions, but i've made
some clothes for elves also.

http://i39.tinypic.com/fcqxok.png - new less shitty looking charcoal

Very nice models and textures!

A made three versions of that model.
One with single log, second you can see on pic and the last - a large pile of charcoal.
I am almost sure that it is possible to make a choice of displayed model to be dependent of the charcoal entity mass.
With such design we can nicely handle stacking of such materials - this not perfect but simple and good looking i think.

Erik asked me if I could use a little bit high-res textures.
And there is it...
A rock!
(a iron ore-hematite to be precise)

Choose A or B( there is almost no diffirence so i couldn't do it myself)
And tell me if bump map isn't too grainy.

[IMG]http://i42.tinypic.com/aatyqs.jpg[/IMG]

A looks nicer, but they are pretty similar. Have you added to the svn repo (I think the hook for sending mail messages to the CVS list when something changes is still broken)?

Yep its still broken, been a long time since I saw svn commits, I just do an update and watch the logs. A is a bit nicer, I think the bump map is good too.