UT skeleton question

Amouro

i have a model that i would like the be an Unreal tounament player model. it's a biped, but it doesn't quite meet the same proportions as any of the defualt skeletons. i was wondering if i can modify one of the normal skeletons and still have it use the default animations. and if i can't do that, does anyone have any good tuts on how to make my own skeleton and import all the animations into UT?

LiveWire

as long as youdont add extra bones or anything, you can simply scale the bones and such around. how much that screws with the animations will depend on how much you deform the skeleton from it's original proportions. if you add exta bones they simply wont animate unless you do them yourself - be warned though, there's a lot of them!

FunkaDelicDass

Probably not a good idea to move bones in the default skeleton to fit your model; the animations will probably be way off, or not work at all.

I wrote a tutorial back for ut2003 that covers this stuff. Still the same process for ut2004, only thing extra is a vehicle driving pose and an additional idle anim. My tutorial is Maya-centric, but it should be easy enough to translate if you're a max user.

http://www.sunny-d.com/ut2003tut_intro.html

diZzyWalnut

Well , last week-end I've done few tests ( riggings and figures modes ) with my GOBLIN_SPACE_MARINE to get him properly into UT 2004.
If I understand well - in a fact the model-character has to be really close (similar) to the skeleton's proportions from UT 2003 or 2004 which You want to use ( for exemple - HumanMale or Alien ; etc. etc. etc.)
There's no sens and reason to use "FIGURE MODE of BIPED" under 3DS MAX ... why ? ; cause once Your model imported into UT 2003/2004 his mesh is adjusted (fit) on skeleton original , so ... it's clear - animations is no correct and mainly the mesh of Your model is deformed.


(animations : James Edwards, Steve Jones, animator dudes @ DE - copyright : Digital Extremes ).

I'm still working on , he's going soon into UT 2004.

Amouro

thanks for the advice. i saw in another thread ya'll are talking about people using skin instead of physique nowadays. can i use skin for UT models or does it even matter either way?

LiveWire

dosnt matter.

Rakile

You can make your own bone structure for UT as well. I'm pretty sure that you just have to keep a naming convention that's as close to the default skeleton's as possible. I once animated a large construction robot for an ill-fated school project, and the programmers were able to import it into UT 2003.

I imagine that 2004 is fairly similar in most cases.

LiveWire

as long as the skeleton and bones names are the same it will work fine - though in that case you might as well just use a biped in the firstplace. extra bones wont make the animations 'not work' - basically anything with the same name will animate, and anything not in the original animations will not. for example, is you atached extra bones to control a thrid arm or something, the rest of the animation would play as normal, but the third arm would be in it's default pose.

don't know if that would work if the hirachy is changed drastically, or even a little, but i guess you could try it and find out.

anyway, i guess you have to ask yourself: do you need extra bones for anything to animate? cos if you do then using the UT animations will be useless, because they wont animate them, and you'll have to make a complete set of custom ones. in which case you can make you skelton from scratch if you want cos you wont be using the UT animations at all.