Plan for Jeff Gran

Well, I've gotten seriously side-tracked from work on my character content pack. The issue was that we needed a skeleton that could be common across all human characters released and supported by Garage Games.

I had tried to come up with a workflow using the BraveTree Girl Pack's skeleton and editing it to work with other models, but it proved to be too much work for the result. The other problem was getting animations to play across different characters, which didn't work because of the different starting rotations of the bones.

Then I went to GDC, and saw a presentation by a major game company explaining how they tackled this problem with a script that generates the same skeleton each time, based on user-input joint locations.

So I took the idea and made my own script that generates a skeleton, at the correct scale and orientation for Torque, with the DTS hierarchy automatically created, bounding box, optional mount points, customized IK foot controls and spine controls, and a choice between IK and FK for the arms. If you turn off these customized controls, the bones will be generated but no control rig will, so advanced riggers or people with special needs can make their own custom controls.

You create the joint markers with a button, move them to your character's joint locations, and the script creates the skeleton - already ready to export. The joint rotations are zero-ed out as part of the creation process, so animations made with one character will play correctly on any other character that uses a skeleton generated by the script, as long as you use the "blend" animation type.

Also, you can save out the locations of your joint markers as a tiny text file, so if you want to have someone do animations for your character, all they need is the script and the locations and they can recreate the exact skeleton and export DSQs that will work perfectly for said character.

I put the finishing touches on the MaxScript version yesterday, and have passed it along to certain associates for testing. Next I will be making a MEL (Maya) version that will function exactly the same way (and soon after there are plans to get versions for other 3d packages). The marker location files will be cross-compatible, so you can give your locations to someone using another software package and they can use it to make animations as mentioned above.

Also, Chris Calef's pre-canned rag-doll animations will soon be compatible with this skeleton system, so any character using a script-generated skeleton will be able to use his animation pack.

Finally, here's a screenshot to prove it's real: