on animating...

almighty_gir

ooook well some people may have seen my last animation, which was here: www.mechmod.com/team/Almighty_gir/victory.rar

anyway, that was done using a skeletal rig, with no IK/FK setting at all, and now im learning to use biped. its great, i love how its helping me, and it is very simple to use.

one or two problems though. i want to animate his cape while he moves. is there any way in the biped settings, to add new bones/biped parts to the rig? im planning to put this into hl2, but i dont want the jacket to look like a staticly charged polythene bag that is just rigged to his legs all the time. i want to try and take advantage of the havok physics as much as i can!

any help would be greatly appreciated =]

SkullboX

You can just add bones (or dummies, boxes, teapots) to a biped rig by using the link tool. Make a hierarchy like any normal bone chain and link the root of echt chain to the shoulders/neck/upper spine link, whatever works for your rig. Obviously this works with skin, but with physique as well. You can't add any actualy biped links apart from those present when creating a biped.

I personally get depresseed whenever I see a biped and will take a custom built rig over it any day, but I believe some animators actually prefer it. Monster (on this board) is an expert on working with biped and he's doing great stuff with it. Some form of black magic, no doubt.

almighty_gir

hehe, well building a skeleton takes so little time, that its beneficial, but i get confused easily during the hours that i am actually able to practice (before and after work, when its too early and im a zombie, or its too late and im too tired). so learning how to use IK/FK solvers during those periods is too much =/

thanks for your input though ill most certainly give some new things a go! and if this thread gets the attention of Monster, then that will be awsome =]



edit: ive just had a thought! if i set up the characters collision mesh, so that the bones affecting the cloak will be hit by the feet/legs, would that mean i wouldnt need to animate the jacket, and just animate a standard run/walk animation, so that in-game, the jacket would be free-moving?

monster

You guys are too kind. The trick to animating with Biped is pretending that you aren't using Biped. Just pose the little guy at timed intervals. Then adjust the intervals for timing.

gir, what you describe in your edit is how I setup Rayne in Bloodrayne2.

http://www.canalgame.com/data/docs/20050217112357/bloodrayne2_1.jpg

Of course you're on your own applying physics to the bones in HL2, as I have no idea how to do that.

SkullboX

[ QUOTE ]
You guys are too kind. The trick to animating with Biped is pretending that you aren't using Biped. Just pose the little guy at timed intervals. Then adjust the intervals for timing.

[/ QUOTE ]
That's what I tried and most FK controls are sufficient (though it can be a huge pain that biped keys can be lower than zero, or can't be dragged 'over' other keyframes using the timeslider) and track view editing is almost useless... but whenever I try and use IK everything turns bad.

Of course I might just have to seriously alter my workflow, as 'forgetting I'm using biped' has never done the trick for me. With custom rigs I just drag a point helper around that controls the IK chains and manually edit the type of interpollation and it always just works technically the way I want it. Biped is very tight up about how you set the keys, and actually alters keys if at any point you snap out of limit (which is extremely annoying especially when setting keys) and I've found that it's near impossible to easily edit IK keys afterwards, as shifting them across the timeline will ruin everthing - for me at least. That's not even mentioning the four different key types (normal, free IK, planted and sliding).

Last but not least there is the COM, which I think is the first AI to have developed a personality, because that thing sure as hell doesn't work on logic, especially in max 7.