B Tutorial Animation No Assumed Skill: Making and Implementing Your Own Animations

[GetAssista]

By the way, this excellent thread needs to be in tutorials subforum.

Yoshi?

 

[Psiphoon]

So, for times 1, 2, and 3, delete the top two rows of bone information. That is, delete the rows beginning with 0 and 1. Now, acquire carpal tunnel syndrome by renumbering all the remaining rows so that they are numbered from 0 to 19 under each time value. I recommend using the keyboard – replace a number, then use the arrow keys to get to the next row, replace that, and so on. It doesn’t take long once you get the hang of it. Obviously, each number needs to be 2 lower than it is – so 2 becomes 0, 3 becomes 1 and so on. You must renumber them manually, because the information beside these numbers is unique, so you can't just paste over it (though there might be some fancy way of replacing them en masse which I haven’t thought of). Now replace the time values so that the 4 time values for the whole SMD are, in order: 0, 1, 30, and 100.

Jesus christ! Whoever made that exporter ballsed up big time, although perhaps the whole "thigh" thing didn't matter in source so it went unnoticed. It's really frustrating as well, because xsi is much better than max for animation, but I always end up with loads of frames and there's no way I'm renumbering all those bones for every single one. There has surely got to be a way of avoiding doing such a simple task manually.


ps: If anyone knows a way to "freeze" objects in xsi to make them unselectable (but still rigged and visible), please say how it's done. Or any other way of making selecting those bones quicker and easier for that matter. Would be muchly helpful

 

[Papa Lazarou]

How many frames do you typically end up with? I expect attack animations would only require between 10 and 20 frames at the most.

If anyone knows a way to "freeze" objects in xsi to make them unselectable (but still rigged and visible), please say how it's done. Or any other way of making selecting those bones quicker and easier for that matter. Would be muchly helpful

I haven't messed with XSI for a while, but I think you can open the explorer thingy (by pressing 8 or 0 I think?) and select the bones on their names in the list. That way you wouldn't have to fight past the mesh every time.

 

[Psiphoon]

Depends, if it's something like a parry you can bring it down as low as five frames. I try and follow the mocapped data with attack animations and go for about 70-120. It could probably be less if I cut out some inbetweens, but I try and avoid letting the game engine interpolate as much as possible because it can sometimes do weird things, like when the arm sometimes does a full rotation after an axe throw. Reload animations, espescially for something slow like a musket can easily run into the three-hundreds, doing all that re-numbering by hand is just not practical, particularly when you'll be wanting to test it in-game and then tweak it.

Maybe I'll try and learn programming from scratch and do it myself, it seems like the kind of application a beginner could make.

 

[xenoargh]

Use FragMotion, it's a lot less cumbersome and less buggy than XSI.

It's nagware, but it's very solid nagware, at least for M&B.

 

[Arch3r]

I will contact an admin to have this moved to Unofficial Tutorials. Easier to find stuff there .

 

[Berthout]

Now I cannot get the skeleton to import properly. I've done it some 20 times and I still get the colored vertices. Any ideas?

I keep on having the same problem too. So far i tried exporting it at least 30 times and still not a single good one..

Could somebody who managed to export the skeleton upload it?

 

[TheArmourer]

What other alternate programs are there for the XSI Mod Tool?

 

[Bloodbane]

Thanks for the tutorial

 

[Yoshiboy]

Can't remember if I have praised this but it deserves more. Also the method of taking still frames, (or often importing an animated texture onto a plane) is used frequently by animators without access to motion capture, so don't feel silly!

 

[DeepRedCee]

This is a brilliant tutorial thus far however my OpenBrf is taking forever to split actions from the txt file im not sure whether its crashed or what but its been 5 mins and nothings happened.. :/

 

[Papa Lazarou]

I think it creates a very large file (almost 2 gigs), so it might just be taking a long time. Not sure what would cause it otherwise.

Luckily, you don't actually need to split the actions.txt - its just to help understanding. You should be able to finish the tutorial without doing that part. Let me know if you have any trouble!

 

[Teutonic Archer Knight]

I downloaded the valve source plugin, and i am draging the file in XSI but its not installing

 

[Papa Lazarou]

I've uploaded a scene for XSI Mod Tool which contains a properly-deforming character model. Download it here - http://www.mbrepository.com/file.php?id=2661

 

[uraikus]

I made a animation and everything,
But is there a way to make it a itcf_my_whatever (the animation tag for weapons)
instead of just replacing a current one?

Great job at this tutorial!

 

[Papa Lazarou]

I don't think so, unfortunately. I don't know of any way to do that anyway.

 

[poomtang]

Excellent tutorial, just tried it, it works! Great job.

 

[Papa Lazarou]

I've just added a note about the jaggedness to the first post.

Basically it turns out that the problem is caused by the ValveSource SMD importer, not by Warband or XSI Mod Tool. You can fix it (mostly) by reassigning vertices to their proper bones. Remember that you only export information from the bones, so the mesh being wonky will not effect your animations, except to the extent that you might find it harder to animate with a crappy mesh. For instructions on reassigning vertices to fix the jaggedness, see the green paragraph in the first post.

 

[Michigan J. Frog]

I solved my own question. If you want to select multiple joints, you just need to hold shift and click. Sped up the copying/pasting/deleting of keyframes A LOT

Thanks for a wonderful tutorial. Now I can finally finish one of my many attempts at modding Mount and Blade

Thanks

Edit: Just finished my animation, and I couldn't have done it without this tutorial.
Once more, thanks, and btw, I'll be expecting my batch of cookies

 

[Mike Hawk]

Really nice tutorial. 1 thing I'd like to add, there is a simpler way to export SMD, one that does not require deleting lines and renumbering them (really useful if you have a lot of frames). It all has to do with how the exporting works. Bones are exported according to hierarchy (the almighty mesh is an exception to this, as it is always first and it won't export without it). So what you do is go into the explorer window (view -> general -> explorer) and make the mesh your second parent (first being the scene_root). Just drag the mesh into scene_root in the explorer. Next, put abdomen under mesh, so that thigh now has no bones under parent. Delete the thigh bone, then right click on abdomen and click "copy all animation". Click on mesh and "paste all animation". Put all the bones that are under abdomen constraint/parent under mesh and delete abdomen. Export unchecking the 1st and 3rd option (leave 2nd option checked). Now you get a smd export with 19 bones and correct rotation. All you have to do is rename rename the bones (copy it from a native smd or from this tutorial) and you're done.

Note: check the export, sometimes the hierarchy gets messed up. I do not know why that is. R5 R6 R7 should be the last exported bones. If that is not the case redo the entire procedure. It takes about 30 seconds.