Death animations from Blender to TGE
by Jan-Ove Leksell · in Artist Corner · 07/25/2005 (9:11 am) · 10 replies
Hello everyone, here is yet another thread about the character animation/exporter in blender. I've been pulling my own hair out at several occasions and I've used the forums here and found some answers but I keep running into problems. The thing is that I really like blender, it didn't take much time to learn and it does what I want it to do and fast, not to say the fact that it's free. The problem is in the documentation surrounding the exporter which is thin to say the least.
The mayor idiocies I've overcome this far is making the arms and head move up and down as you aim, having the gun recoiling as you fire and getting the death animation to work, the problem I'm having now is the way I got the Death Animation to work was by adding two bones to the armature named "ski0" and "ski1" in order to make the char tilt according to the terrain he lays on, and then putting in a mesh named "Bounds" not parented to anything, I found this in the Gus tutorial where they just mention that you need this without any explanation. And sure thing, the model keels over in pain as he dies but of course this totally f**ked up the rest of the animation, it's not supposed to be easy is it *sigh*
Anyway, what now happens is that the run, back, side and all other standard animations are playing at random speeds, sometimes the run animation plays at about 1/10 of the original speed and slowly accelerated to about three times the original speed as you keep running forward, sometimes it plays about a fifth of the animation and then plays the same sequence backwards and repeats, everything is totally random and makes no sense what so ever, everything up till now I've managed to fix but here I'm at a total loss. I've tried to start over, go back to an old save before I started animating and add the "ski" bones and "Bounds" box and redo the whole thing but I get the same thing, I've also tried to set all the GRND Frames to their maximum value and changed the Bounds box to an empty but all I get are different behaviours resembling the ones I described earlier.
If I remove the "Bounds" box all animations work fine except the fact that instead of playing a death animation, Torque takes it to another level and kill itself with a big windows error window. If you change "death" to "dead" or "mushroom" or whatever you like, it works without the "Bounds" box and thus all other animations works perfectly but the tilt doesn't which makes the char sink halfway through the ground every time you don't stand on a flat surface and that looks real bad. Have someone gotten by this and still kept the "tilt" effect?
The mayor idiocies I've overcome this far is making the arms and head move up and down as you aim, having the gun recoiling as you fire and getting the death animation to work, the problem I'm having now is the way I got the Death Animation to work was by adding two bones to the armature named "ski0" and "ski1" in order to make the char tilt according to the terrain he lays on, and then putting in a mesh named "Bounds" not parented to anything, I found this in the Gus tutorial where they just mention that you need this without any explanation. And sure thing, the model keels over in pain as he dies but of course this totally f**ked up the rest of the animation, it's not supposed to be easy is it *sigh*
Anyway, what now happens is that the run, back, side and all other standard animations are playing at random speeds, sometimes the run animation plays at about 1/10 of the original speed and slowly accelerated to about three times the original speed as you keep running forward, sometimes it plays about a fifth of the animation and then plays the same sequence backwards and repeats, everything is totally random and makes no sense what so ever, everything up till now I've managed to fix but here I'm at a total loss. I've tried to start over, go back to an old save before I started animating and add the "ski" bones and "Bounds" box and redo the whole thing but I get the same thing, I've also tried to set all the GRND Frames to their maximum value and changed the Bounds box to an empty but all I get are different behaviours resembling the ones I described earlier.
If I remove the "Bounds" box all animations work fine except the fact that instead of playing a death animation, Torque takes it to another level and kill itself with a big windows error window. If you change "death" to "dead" or "mushroom" or whatever you like, it works without the "Bounds" box and thus all other animations works perfectly but the tilt doesn't which makes the char sink halfway through the ground every time you don't stand on a flat surface and that looks real bad. Have someone gotten by this and still kept the "tilt" effect?
#3
07/29/2005 (7:22 am)
@Joseph: Yeah, I guess the ski0 and ski1 bones and the "tilt" when the character is dead is what ground transform is about? Feel free to correct me as I'm only guessing. Please tell us if you come up with anything :] 
#6
1: Now there is just one final glitch to fix, as the player dies he go down and all bones play perfect except the arms (the bones controlled by the look and recoil animation bones) They end up pointing straight up at the sky, looks pretty silly :P Anyone had this problem?
2: Also I implemented a reload animation that have two problems:
(a): The arms fly around flapping like a shot bird when the animation plays.
(b): The reload animation only have keys for the arm bones but as the animation plays while standing still the rest of the bones in the model go back to the original pose (not the root but the pose as rigged) The result is that the model goes all stiff except for the arms that flap around, when you are running on the other hand the reload animation wont play at all.
Anyone have any ideas or some resource that might help?
08/04/2005 (2:16 pm)
@Joseph: Thanks man! The problem was nr 7, the GT frames, I set them all to 0 except for the death animations and now it works fine :) 1: Now there is just one final glitch to fix, as the player dies he go down and all bones play perfect except the arms (the bones controlled by the look and recoil animation bones) They end up pointing straight up at the sky, looks pretty silly :P Anyone had this problem?
2: Also I implemented a reload animation that have two problems:
(a): The arms fly around flapping like a shot bird when the animation plays.
(b): The reload animation only have keys for the arm bones but as the animation plays while standing still the rest of the bones in the model go back to the original pose (not the root but the pose as rigged) The result is that the model goes all stiff except for the arms that flap around, when you are running on the other hand the reload animation wont play at all.
Anyone have any ideas or some resource that might help?
#8
08/05/2005 (11:07 am)
@Joseph: Well... I only use LocRot keys for my animations, by all bones do you mean the "dummy" bone aswell?
#10
The problem with the reload animation is more or less fixed thanks to our programer, the remaining problem is the fact that if I animate the bone in the players lower right arm or his hand or the mountpoint the animation is inverted on just about all axes on those bones, as long as I only animate the left arm and the upper right bone everything works fine, no fricking idea why it's doing this tho..
Does anyone know of a good resource or tutorial that actually explains the thread system? The documentation is vauge to say the least and half the images beeing red X's don't really help eighter. *sigh* Im going mad over this, I've spent better part of a week trying and trying and trying without much of a result, it seems that I'm missing something basic.
08/06/2005 (6:57 am)
@Joeph: Well, all bones where already animated, so the problem is still there..The problem with the reload animation is more or less fixed thanks to our programer, the remaining problem is the fact that if I animate the bone in the players lower right arm or his hand or the mountpoint the animation is inverted on just about all axes on those bones, as long as I only animate the left arm and the upper right bone everything works fine, no fricking idea why it's doing this tho..
Does anyone know of a good resource or tutorial that actually explains the thread system? The documentation is vauge to say the least and half the images beeing red X's don't really help eighter. *sigh* Im going mad over this, I've spent better part of a week trying and trying and trying without much of a result, it seems that I'm missing something basic.
Torque Owner Todd Johnson