multiple models and animation
by Jim McLuckie · in Artist Corner · 01/13/2002 (3:41 pm) · 2 replies
I'm not a modeler nor animator, but I have a few of them on my team and I had a question. Our game, Project: Warfare, is class based, much like TFC. We'll have different models for each class. There will be several (I have a very long list) animations for the player, and I was wondering if these animations can be applied to every model, without having to redo them for each model? The players will be pretty similar to eachother. Is this possible or no?
#2
01/16/2002 (11:23 pm)
The answer is yes, the animations can be shared. The names of all the bones in all the characters must match. 
Rhye
In fact, if you use the exact same biped and just tweak the skin modifier's envelopes and vertices for each model you have (to compensate for taller/smaller models), you could have the same animation sequence making the models look like they are moving differently, due to the weighting of the verts.
However, there might be a problem with the file structuring. For example, you will need to tell the .cs file where each .dsq is located. It looks like it can go down the tree with no problem. I'm not sure about the other way, though.
If you can figure out how to make each .cs read from one file folder where all of the animations are stored then I think (though I'm relatively new at this) that you should be ok.