Rigging and animating?

SuPa-

Hi, I'm just wonder how I should rig my model and which joints I should assign to where so I can minimize stretching and make it more natural
If someone could show low-poly examples I'd be really happy :poly114:


Here's the vertex coloring of the bones to the mesh
I'm using Milkshape 3d to animate this

SuPa-

WIP of the walk animation

Got any suggestions for it so far?

Eric Chadwick

Looks like you have enough bones, but you're not really taking advantage of them at this point. There's no secondary motion on the rider, head, wings, tail.

First of all though, the motion is more of a frog-hop than a walk. You should study videos of real quadrapeds and how they walk/run/gallop, frame-by-frame. Notice in particular how they never push off nor land with both feet.

You've going in the right direction, in that you're animating the primary motion first, before adding secondary motion, but you still need to get the primary looking better.

And how would the rider shoot the gun when his steed is moving?

The armor segments on his legs should be weighted 100% to a single bone each, so they don't stretch. Looks like the short rear-calf armor is stretching.

This belongs in the pimp section, methinks.

SuPa-

Yeah, for the rider and other things besides the legs and such I haven't worked on yet (the body just
bobs up and down as of now)

As for walking and firing his gun at the same time, I don't need to take that into account on the way he moves. The game it's going into cannot have a unit attack and walk at the same time xD

Oh, and I can't have the armor on the legs do what you suggested, because of the way the mesh is, and there's no cut tool in Milkshape

Thanks for the critique on the animation so far

And I'll mix up the leg and arm movements some to make things less froggy

SuPa-

Update


This one came out a bit skippy and I think a bit fast, maybe the other one did too
I also made the gun not bounce as much, but I don't feel like making a new GIF just for that

Eric Chadwick

I'd suggest getting some video reference.

SuPa-

I actually like the hope-like movement xD
Another update

Flynny

Looking good so far mate...

No idea how far Milkshape goes towards animation so heres my big points.
If you offset the timing of the front left and back right leg itl start to go a good direction I think.
At the minute both back and front legs just seem to wade, more so the front, start using all the bones you have available, I know its more work but itl be well worth it. By this I mean thew front legs are only using 1 joint mostly, bla hard to describe, just work at it ;p

SuPa-

Ok, I will after I finish the rest of the anims (deadline for the competition at the WarCraft III site I go to is coming up and I need to finish it) And then I'll go back and touch up things. Here's an example of milkshape's animating: It makes pivot in 3ds Max look completely awesome, and most people seem to complain about pivot sucking xD

But I think it's ok

Eric Chadwick

Animation is looking better! You do seem to have a problem with the loop point though. Also usually a loop animation is just one cycle, to save space when exported to the game, but it looks like you might have 7 cycles there?

SuPa-

It's one cycle, I just made a GIF with a recording program, so I let it loop itself a few times
Milkshape has its own AVI recorder, but I don't think you can make it just record on single animation

SkullboX

The improvement from the first animation to to the last is really impressive.

The lack of Inverse Kinematics in Milkshape really shows, which would allow you to easily keep the feet planted and moving along the ground even if you change the body. One problem the rig has in my opinion is that the front upper legs are far too short, which really limits the degree of motion, still it works pretty good.

The biggest problem at this point is that the front legs (which have the most weight to carry) are just stroking the floor. He needs to actually land on them pretty hard and push back hard again. This is hard to tweak using forward kinematics (rotating each bone by hand), but that is the biggest point you could improve on, far more than any secondary animation (which does looks very nice by the way).

The hind legs by contrast work very well, they actually seem to push the weight further. Since the motion is forward and there is very little weight behind the hind legs, the stress on them during the landing isn't that big.

Finally, but this is especially diffulcult when you don't have an IK system, it would look great if the feet moved independently like Eric suggested. Not 2 - 2. First the right hind leg, then the left, then the right front leg, then the left, in some succession would make it a lot more believable, as right now the primairy and secundary animation is entirely symetrical.

Still the animation has come a long way and you should probably save most of the above for when you get to animate with a tool designed for character animation. In milkshape it would simply be too tedious to tweak. Good luck!

SuPa-

Thanks for the critique, I'll try my best.
A little problem I spotted myself would be that the body moves backwards once the arms are about to touch down xD