Puppet Master - Intro

#1 Sounds awesome! Thank you for doing this, looks great!
Would love to donate a small amount for stuff like a screen recording software or something similar if it's needed, just give me a way of doing it! ;)

Gotta support these kinds of initiatives!

#2 Good idea. Maybe you could add some advanced animations for 3rd stage like cover, melee attacks, and etc...
I'll be following your progress!

#3 That's a great initiative!

Having a properly-rigged Blender model would go a long way towards helping out new users!

#4 Thanks for taking this on. Once you have things ready to share we can include a link from the T3D GitHub Wiki.

- Dave

#5 Do you already have an idea about a uniform rig? We should unify to have one standard rig and naming, so models and animations can all be replaced without much trouble.
Also I see you have some control bones in there, the last time I tried to animate a model with control bones the animation got lost somehow on export to collada and Torque only noticed the real direct manipulations of the bones and ignoring animatinos done through control bones, does this work now?

#6 @All
thx for the comments
The stages are not going to use the same model
would be kinda weird if a wooden puppet would start to talk
that is why stage 2 is going to be represented by a crash test dummy model
i know taht is weird aswell but it gives 2 important things
a) it still lets you understand how the bones are going to affect your model

b) the facial structure is humanoid like and therefore - expressions are going to look realistic

@Lukas Joergensen
thx but am good

@Kory
the animation Database is not going to depend on the stage

stuff like melee/ cover could actually find its way earlier in
but lets first start/ publish stage 1

@Dave
will do that for sure

@Duion
ye that is exactly the idea
The skeleton in its current state
has already allot of usable mountpoints
and it will receive a facerig
along with that some extra bones

so yes the actual idea is to create a unified skeleton
that could be/ depending on the commitee - included in a future version
of T3D MIT

along with that - i would like to give others the chance to contribute to the cause
by creating animations with this skeleton
so that in time T3D MIT can have its own Database for Animations

hope this explaisn teh whole thing a bit better
and keep asking/ suggestion
am not done yet with stage one
but its on its way

#7 Are there only bones for 3 fingers? I have seen that elsewhere, maybe to save resources, but a unified rig should be complete, I think nowadays we can afford some more details, like individual fingers and face animations.

#8 there are actually 5-fingerbones
and along with that
evyr hand has a mountpoint - bone

so don`t worry we aren`t going the half way with it

yes you are right you saw a early version of the model that had only a simple block shaped hand
that was just because i wasn`t done with the hands

but here just for your confidence

#9 I meant the bones, I only saw 3 finger bones in the first picture.

With naming I already made some thoughts and I would name them like the makehuman full rig, since makehuman is an awesome program with which everyone can create models, if we would have an implementation for it, this would be great.

The workflow could go, create a character in makehuman, export him and he will immediately work with the animations in Torque, since it is the same rig and naming.

#10 I like Duion's idea. I think eventually providing support for MakeHuman characters in T3D could be a bit of an edge for making characters and player models for games. I will be watching this closely.

#11 and that has been explored aswell
currently i have issues when
exporting my rig from makehuman to blender
somehow the bones are messed up

so yes even that is planed ;)

am hoping for the next update of makehuman to solve my issues
currently i have no problem to get my custom armature into makehuman
but gettin it into blender results well with some wird weight issues

However we will see and i cannot guarentee that i will get a bridge fro makehuman aswell but its in my backhead

edit:
export image of makehuman
you can see that there is another rig in the rig select options
:)

#12 J0liner, I am very impressed and this is great news for T3D MIT. Default rigs will help all the content packs to also use the same basis.

Currently everything is disjointed :-P

Thanks and great work!

#13 As I have also mentioned a few times in my thread running currently in the blender section of these forums, I'm hoping this can bridge the blender gap. I too am looking to establish some tutorials, mainly on making weapons for T3D in Blender, and one of the things you need for proper animation is the player model. I'd love to see some great success out of this end, so I'll be watching this closely :)

#14 the thing with makehuman is the following


the Link that explains this
www.makehuman.org/blog/rig_library.html

what u see here is there upcoming new interface for armatures
problem here seems to be that there is nomore support for custom rigs

now i will investigate what my optiosn are and if i can i will do some changes so that we can actually get our custom rig into the upcoming makehuman release and even if not there are options
within the onLoad function where we could define
mountpoitns so those get saved into the cached version of the .dae file
taht would be the cached.dts file

Anyways we will see and i will keep you updated with it

#15 Jolinar,

EXCELLENT idea! I was wanting to do something similar but, just never got the time. A universal rig is a great idea but, we also need to figure out an 'artist friendly' way to add custom animations. That's a bit further down the line. I will follow this, give a shout if you need help with anything.

Ron

#16 I already successfully converted makehuman to blender and to Torque, if something is messed up in blender, it is likely a bug and they get fixed from time to time, but sadly also added from time to time, so I always have a few different blender versions installed to test with.
The "game" rig of makehuman is not good, it has no individual fingers and so on, so our standard should be the full one.

#17 well Duion
what i ment with i got my Rig into makehuman
is the one you see on the pictures
i got that one into makehuman
that wasn`t that hard

however as you can see the mhuman team changed alot in the newest version
today i tried to run it
but without luck
seems some issues with 64bit

anyways will see what comes up

#18 What I meant was, that you name the bones the same like in one good makehuman default rig, so you can chose this while exporting your makehuman model and it will run in Torque without having to modify anything, the animations will work since the animation files will be build with the same rig, so there would be no need to get a rig into another model or a model into a rig or modify some things.

#19 how should i put this
i could simply take makehumans armature/ i dont need to name some bones so that they fit for the makehuman models as this wouldnt work

if you have ever played with weight painting/ skinning a character
you would understand that simply naming your bones the way another armature is set up doesnt work - you dont get what u think you would

as the bone length/ bone roll is different
and if you dont parent the model the way its parented in makehuman
its one more issue you get

anyways there is a reason why a custom rig
and lets be honest even if you would export a makehuman model
what would you do with it? seriously
those models are in no way optimized - no lod stages
nothing
your model would be a bottleneck

Makehuman is ment as a quick character creation tool
you have to rework the model nm what
and those extras like cloth or hats that are in makehuman/ well
thats far from being what it could be

hope this sheds some light
its not always gold even if it shines
and well you can always use auto weight painting
that lets you quick test your model
anyways - its goign to be a custom rig for universal usage
and if possible makehuman compatible when i get the newest makehuman release to work

#20 Ok I will leave it to you, since I have no real experience in this part, I don't want to mess things up, these were just my ideas and what I would like to have.
I have already given up with this topic when I noticed the stock files did not import/export well, starting from scratch was to much for me, because of that I only played around with a pre-build makehuman so far.