Central Grip Shield animations

Users who are viewing this thread

I just posted a very similar topic on mod development, but I realised a mod that focuses on ancient warfare would be more prone to answer my question (besides lynores and elabor are some of the best modders around): Does anyone know of animations for central grip shields being developed? Using scutums with historicaly innacurate leather straps feels terrible! Is hegemony going to use C grip on samnite, roman, celtic, carthaginian or some other culture's shields?
Thank you
 
I'm not aware of any other's that have or are developing that.

I think the trick would be figuring out how to discern different animations for the different shields. I'm not even sure how they handled them for the period of C3C either come to think of it.
 
As most of the shields from 100 AD to the dark ages were central grip, making all of them use the same animation would be a good solution on a mod that portraits that timeframe. To earlier times, the only exception to central grip I can think of is the hoplon... for that particular shield, the animations from native are good enough. Bah, there must be a way to show both
 
To my knowledge, and I'm fairly sure it's true, it's currently impossible to have proper animations for both strap-held shields and hand grip shields. You could try and make an animation that can be made to work for both. I was working on a 1066 mod a couple of years back in which I changed the animations to work for boss grip shields. I had the idea to make cavalry kite shields with arm straps which would have had arm straps but also a little leather loop for the hand to the right of the shield, suitable for the bent hand position necessary for the boss grip shields. I think that could have looked acceptable, and it does have some historical providence at least as far as the Bayeux tapestry shows. I didn't actually experiment with this, though, so I can only assume, but I can't see any reason for it not working.
 
well, i've been toying with fragmotion and noticed that changing simple animations related to the arm and hand positions is quite easy. Changing a pre-made scutum griping point, however, is rocket science to me.
 
The shield is simply glued to the left forearm as far as the grip point is concerned. That's where a shield model will be centred, not on the actual hand. This is a 3D modelling job rather than an animation one. Load up a shield in Wings3D (use open brf to export as .obj file then import in Wings or Blender or whatever). Look at where the hand grip is for that shield; that's roughly where you should put the shield boss's grip since you know that's where a hand can reach. That's where you want to put your shield. Like I said, it's easy to know where to put the hand in the animation mode if you export the skeleton with the shield you want to use as a reference attached to the skeleton model. OpenBRF allows you to do this. Without that you're just guessing, which would be as bad as rocket science.

You'll need to do a bit of work to get a shield with a proper boss and grip; it requires a much more complex face arrangement than just having a flat board with a boss hovering over it (that's what the native shields are like). Hard to appreciate until you actually make it, but basically having the boss a real part of the shield means you have a lot more vertices that need to be connected, hence a lot more faces, and that'll make the blood spatter effect very odd since it applies to each face almost individually. It looks very odd with small faces so you need to be very creative, and I never really managed a decent arrangement.
 
Yeah lining up the shield mesh wouldn't be an issue for me, its just the matter of sliding the mesh around.

Just the animation is all that I would need.
 
Have you seen Raptor's (unfinished) Ghost Soldiers mod? The screenshots and video show troops which appear to be holding the scutum 'correctly', rather than in the traditional M&B way.
Here is a link: http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,121166.msg2926197.html#msg2926197

I don't know if he'd be willing to share his work/advice (or even available to do so; he doesn't seem to be regularly checking the forums and hasn't updated his mod thread for months), but it certainly seems to show that the animations can be done.
 
Nice one mate.

My only critique would be that the forearm should be moved forward a bit, and subsequently the shield so as to allow for the running animation without clipping through the shield.
 
I couldn't see any clipping while the character ran, just posted some new pics of my "running tests"  :grin:  These new animations do have at least one limitation though: it's impossible to position the shield facing down while blocking. Something to do with the new angles I used. The caracter moves the shield to the side when the players tries to look at it's feet while holding block. In order to block blows from way down (seen only in sieges,  when the the atacker climbs a latter and the defender stands on the wall, much to high) the defender has to face a litle higher than the real atacker's positon. But this is really hard to notice.
 
Oh I see, the shield reverts to the side position when running.

Cool that you worked out the various angles for block positions. What I was working on before with Calous, I only had the one position available. Granted, I didn't do much research into resolving the various animations, which probably could have been done If some time was spent into it.
 
Yeah, I'm realising just now that the hard part is to mod all the scutum shield models I have to fit the animations. And the aspis (to make de symbols and drawings on the shield surface look right when it's being held blocking). And the oval shields. And everything usable from vanilla that's not round.

Oh boy.
 
What I did was work through BRF for that.

You can rotate and move xyz in it, so what I did was move around one in BRF till it fit in game, writing the adjustments down, then once I was satisfied I just put in the same adjustments for all other shields.

Or being that you have one done, you just adjust that one with another one in BRF till the two match up, then adjust all others.
 
ealabor said:
What I did was work through BRF for that.

You can rotate and move xyz in it, so what I did was move around one in BRF till it fit in game, writing the adjustments down, then once I was satisfied I just put in the same adjustments for all other shields.

Or being that you have one done, you just adjust that one with another one in BRF till the two match up, then adjust all others.
Great to hear.Warband doesn't really have a proper,good animation for shield-holding,especially for this period and for Scutums in 3rd century AD,as i mentioned hundreds of times.
 
Gonna post my results (the animations, models and .txt) in M&B repository later today, after I finish adapting some shields to the animations (I''m using some models I got from Peloponnesian War and Imperium Romanum. Feel free to use it as you see fit. Personaly I was always quite frustrated with having to use M&B medieval animations on ancient times mods. The only txt file changed was actions.txt, so i'ts probably compatible with most mods around.
 
VictorF said:
Gonna post my results (the animations, models and .txt) in M&B repository later today, after I finish adapting some shields to the animations (I''m using some models I got from Peloponnesian War and Imperium Romanum. Feel free to use it as you see fit. Personaly I was always quite frustrated with having to use M&B medieval animations on ancient times mods. The only txt file changed was actions.txt, so i'ts probably compatible with most mods around.
Great.Can't wait to see them. :smile:
Ealabor,this looks promising. :wink:

Btw i will send you a PM Victor...
 
Back
Top Bottom