(Redo) WIP of new Soldier Model

[Destructavator]

OK, I did a bunch of tiny little fixes, worked on the legs, and merged a ton of unnecessary edges and vertexes that really didn't need to be there (many were so close with such tiny little polys the player would *never* notice them) and cut the poly count down to just 763 vertexes.

If this looks OK, I'll also clean up the female model as well.

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[Destructavator]

Here's the cleaned-up female model, with a vertex count of ~909.  I couldn't really cut out any more trivial details without affecting the female curves and such, although before I fine-tuned it the poly count was gigantic.

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[Destructavator]

OK, here's a link to the latest Blend file, with all the latest corrections for both the male and female version.  All the textures have also been re-built and included in the file.

http://www.destructavator.com/92dl/Soldier2_Armor.zip

If these look OK, I'd say go ahead and go with these.  (At least to the data source, obviously they can't be included in-game yet until Vedrit animates them and I make heads for them.)

[Mattn]

please keep in mind that you also have to set tags - they must be animated, too (move with the model)

tags are there for letting the engine know where to hold weapons, there to put the head and so on. afair hoehrer wrote a blender script for exporting them, too.

[vedrit]

tags? eh....I know nothing about tags. And at the moment, its not animated, since its not even fully rigged. I just wanted to get it on the SVN so that anyone else that wanted to could help with rigging and the eventual tagging and animating

[Mattn]

i've added some more information to the modelling articles in our wiki

[Destructavator]

I did some research on tags - In Blender they are "Empties" which are attached to parts of bones in the skeleton.

Vedrit, if you can build skeletons for the latest male and female models, I think I can add the tags quite easily if I read the right information I found on the web.  Basically the tags are parented to specific parts of bones so the game engine knows where to attach weapons in the hands, the head on the neck, etc.

Adding the tags shouldn't be too hard, I'd imagine the skeleton and body animations will probably be the most work at this point.

Edit: Vedrit, do you have any place to upload what you've come up with?

[bayo]

IMHO, a tag should be a bone, then its more something for animator.

[Destructavator]

IMHO, a tag should be a bone, then its more something for animator.

True, it would probably make it easier to animate a bone where the tag will go with the rest of the animation, then attach a tag to that bone, yes, I agree, that's a good idea.

[vedrit]

Aside from FileFront, no. The SVN I used for my game stopped working.

Im still a tad fuzzy on the "tag" concept. Where would the bone thats a tag go? Theres a bone for the hand, so why not tag that bone? Then the object will move with the hand, and I and any other animator dont have to worry about an extra bone

[Destructavator]

Im still a tad fuzzy on the "tag" concept. Where would the bone thats a tag go? Theres a bone for the hand, so why not tag that bone? Then the object will move with the hand, and I and any other animator dont have to worry about an extra bone

OK, a tag is kind of like a bone, but instead of being attached to the same mesh or object as the rest of the skeleton it tells the game engine "When I want to attach a weapon to the palm of this models hand, this is where it is and how it will be positioned in the hand."  With the palm of a hand, yes, you could probably get away without an extra bone to show where the weapon goes and how it fits in the hand, if you make the tag for the weapon a child of the hand bone which is the parent.  Yes, you could just slap the tag right on the palm, but you wouldn't be able to do special animations such as having a character twirl a gun in his hand (showing off after shooting something).

An extra bone on top of the neck, for the head, is definitely necessary unless you don't want the character to be able to turn his/her head in any animation.

So if you include a "head bone" on top of the neck and animate it as if the model had a head, instead of putting a real head mesh up there you replace it with a tag that tells the game "this is where a head mesh will be, it just isn't included with this file."

It's kind of like having an armature controlling multiple mesh objects in the same scene, except one is replaced with a tag so that the other object included elsewhere with the game files goes there.  The tag itself isn't really an object and isn't rendered.


I admit that's a clumsy explanation, parts of which you might already know, but I hope it helps.

Aside from FileFront, no. The SVN I used for my game stopped working.

If the file with the skeleton - just the skeleton - isn't too big in size you could attach it right to a post in any thread here, the max attachment size is currently 1024 KB, and you could also compress it in a .zip file to make it fit.

Alternatively you could email the whole thing, my email address linked to my forum profile takes attachments up to 20 MB or so if I remember correctly.  I could then put it on my website server with the other files I've linked to, or pass it around other ways.

[vedrit]

OOOOOohhh! I see. Yeah, it might be handy for idle animations. Add a little "Pizzaz" to it

And I attached the blend file. Its the skeleton and what handles I put in

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[Destructavator]

OOOOOohhh! I see. Yeah, it might be handy for idle animations. Add a little "Pizzaz" to it

Yep, and as you can see, once a skeleton is in place adding the tags is quite simple.

And I attached the blend file. Its the skeleton and what handles I put in

Alright!  I've been itching to see some of these new models running around animated - I'll try this skeleton with the latest models ASAP and report back later on how it works with both the male and female models, or at least the male one.

[Destructavator]

OK, I lined up the skeleton you made with the most recent male model, just two things:

1)  The knees look a little low to me, probably because the final model of the male soldier has higher knees, but this is easy to fix if it really is an issue - I could be wrong though.

2)  The hand bones line up OK, but there aren't any for the fingers.  I could go back and glue them into mittens, but personally I think it would look the best in the game for the soldiers to have animated fingers, while the tags for weapons and items would attach to the palms.  For most weapons and items, the fingers could cup around in a generic pose, although for special animations the fingers could do things, and perhaps for idle animations a soldier could flex a hand or something.  Animating the fingers would also look good for throwing grenades and such, when a grenade leaves the hand the fingers spread out or something.

One other thing - do you have a version of the file where the vertex groups are already created and the skeleton is attached to the model already?  If not, I could take care of this if you want, or you could do it.

Other than that, the skeleton looks great to me, much better than my clumsy attempt with the first soldier model I made.

Edit: I'm guessing the boxes and disc are the "handles."  I can see how they would assist for some animations, although personally I wouldn't need them if I were animating, but that's just me.  (Not that there's anything wrong with them.)

[vedrit]

1) Yeah, the knees arent adjusted for the update. Like you said, easy fix
2) I thought that we werent allowed to do individual fingers. If we can, then HECK YEAH!! I'll gladly add bones for fingers and the joints
3) The only group I made was for one of the hands, mostly to check how the mesh was reacting to the handles. But I can get the file where the mesh is attached to the bones.

Yeah, the boxes and circles are the handles. Its part of the job, and really makes animating easier if the rigging (thats what its called. Putting on the bones and handles) is done right.

Thanks. I havent done much in the way of rigging since my first year of animation. If you asked how to do it in Maya, I would be able to say

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