character animation

(shao) #1

I’m looking at the possibility of using ET as a base for some machinma. I notice that in game characters have basic facial animations, which is no doubt based upon a pretty complex facial skeletal animation sysem (at least for quake3 systems at least).

Will there be any information released based up tools / information needed to create custom facial animations? as this would make ET a great platform for machinima with vocal and facial acting… :smiley:

(Auriel) #2

hmmm i think you should look in the pk3 file (use winzip maybee of pakscape)

(shao) #3

i can see there’s an animations folder in there. But the aninc files look like a new type to me, and model animation information for RTCW was pretty hard to come by, i don’t know of anyone that bothered creating new anims apart from perhaps Wolftactics / WildWest… and there wasn’t any facial animations there…

(Auriel) #4

pretty much all the files that aren’t sounds, graphics, levels or models can be openeed with note pad

(shao) #5

so, you’re suggesting i do facial animations with notepad now? :wink:

(wudan) #6

You can only open the frame definitions in notepad, not the actual animations. AFAIK, the animations are stored in binary, with the model file (same file).

(shao) #7

i didn’t think for a moment character animations were stored in ascii format, and even if they were, they were created with an ascii editor such as notepad.

I am however asking the question about editors, applications, information pertaining to character animation and dynamic cameras… currently as much as i’d like to do stuff for ET i will probably have to end up going for a more advanced engine such as ut2k3 or even waiting for HL2 as i’m not a coder, i’m a producer. We’ll see, but traditionally RTCW player / skin / animation was hard to customise.

(wudan) #8

Not much you can do with ET, in regards to using it as a format for machinima, without source anyway.

The original looked good, imo, but you might not appreciate how ‘hard’ messing with this stuff really is, atm.

(shao) #9

i do appreciate how hard it is, i’ve done map editing, movies, and looked at posibility of doing custom anims for an earlier movie… it is unfortunately frustrating it’s not easier.

(Fluffy_gIMp) #10

The facial animation was something we coded in near the end of the project, it’s script-based and can be found here:

animations\human\heads\base.anim

The model can be found here:

models\players\hud\head.md3

In terms of the animations that are played 3rd person the only anim we have coded as playing is the gritted teeth firing animation, which you could replace with the animation you wanted to play.

-Fluffy_gIMp

(shao) #11

i’m assuming though that there are tools (probably based on gmx) which you used to create these animations. is it also fair to assume you’re using a skeletal facial animation system?

if both of those are true, will the utils be released to produce replacement animations?

(wudan) #12

You have to code support for playing custom animations, or replace existing ones. There isn’t any code, so I’m not sure if you’d be able to do everything you wanted.

(Fluffy_gIMp) #13

Nothing quite that sophisticated I’m afraid, the model was setup in 3dsmax with a custom bone setup which we then exported to a vertex animation format (md3).
The Skeletal format (used for torso & legs) in Wolf is based solely on the 3dsmax biped system which didn’t have the amount of face bones we needed to properly animate the face. So we had to use the vertex format, which means there is no skeletal facial animation system.
As Wudan rightly points out you are limited by not being able to change the code, if you want to do anything more complex than triggering a single animation then you aren’t going to be able to do it I’m afraid.

-Fluffy_gIMp