Boarding game

pixeldamage

Hey guys! I have returned to seek wisdom from the fountain of game artists wizardry once again.....

I have the lucky position of creating characters for a snowboarding game and i'd like to check a few things regarding animating them. The boards will be bound to the feet of the characters and I was wondering if I should make the board part of the mesh before I skin them?

The literature says that "select and link" seems to be the way to go for skateboarding animations but this causes problems as to what to link to exactly? The front part of the board moves differently to the back etc so do you link and use key frames post linkage? Otherwise the board will say stick to the front foot and look weird. I think i'm going to just give it to our Unity programmer as an FBX with the board and player together.

Also for things like backpacks etc should these be linked also or be part of the whole mesh. It would be good to have flexibility to change clothing later but not a necessity.

pixeldamage

anyone?? please?

throttlekitty

Wouldn't this be a better question for who you're making the characters for? Props being part of the character really depends on the design of the game, if they offer any kind of customization options then it probably should be a separate mesh. I'd keep as much separated as I can, anything can be mushed together later on.

pixeldamage

thanks! yeah its a job where a lot of us are doing these things for the first time. I dont think they know what they want yet so i'm looking for the best design route. My findings indicate there's issues with both ways...

malcolm

e-mail Warghoul he did the rigging for the ssx franchise. I believe the board was a seperate mesh but I could be remembering wrong.

throttlekitty

I'm sure the best way would for the rig to have a bone for the boards, but I've no experience there really.

pixeldamage

malcolm wrote: »

e-mail Warghoul he did the rigging for the ssx franchise. I believe the board was a seperate mesh but I could be remembering wrong.

wow I bet he'd be a fantastic resource if he's willing! Can you put me in touch with him? I looked through the members list but couldn't find him

Whargoul

The board was a separate object with it's own bone, we used blendshapes for the flex. The feet were using IK to stay locked in position, and the IK was animated off to do tricks. Simple.

pixeldamage

Ah its spelt "Wh". Nice to meet you Whargoul. Thanks for sharing. This is my first proper venture into animation having been mostly a modeller/texture artist so i'm extremely humbled to have such experienced help. I'm only really use to using biped to do simple walk cycles etc so this projects going to be a challenge to say the least! Really enjoying the challenge though. I've created a male and female character so far and got one of them skinned to the biped and loaded in a few bip files for testing. I got a few accessories (backpack etc) linked to the biped on different layers so I can switch them on/off interactively but when i export as FBX to Maya (as a test) the accessories seem to lose their link and site elsewhere without animation.

What is the purpose of the bone in the board? I was going to morph one board into another using the morpher in max similar to maya blendshapes.

PS- thanks malcolm for putting me in touch

Whargoul

The bone is so that the animators can animate the board too.

pixeldamage

Whargoul wrote: »

The bone is so that the animators can animate the board too.

but surely you'd need more than one bone or there would be no bending possible with just one bone? Also i find my skin keeps getting messed up if I edit the UVs. Ideally I wouldn't have to go back and do things but is their a way around this?

malcolm

I think Cody used blend shapes for all the board deformations. I would imagine the bone was just to rotate and translate the board when it left the feet for the uber tricks.

pixeldamage

malcolm wrote: »

I think Cody used blend shapes for all the board deformations. I would imagine the bone was just to rotate and translate the board when it left the feet for the uber tricks.

Hi Malcolm - who's Cody? Is that Whargoul ? (just saw you're both in Vancouver so i'm assume so!) Thanks for the info - I worked out how to trigger blendshapes using a bone but it turns out that they're not exported with FBX files so I will use another method. Are you both at a triple A studio together?

malcolm

Yeah Cody is Whargoul. We both worked on the ssx franchise at ea for years. I was on the world's team. I've since left ea and am now working at bigpark.

slipsius

Even before reading all the replies, i would have made the board seperate as well. That way you can have the due standing around holding his board at different parts of the game (menus, cut scenes, etc). For the ingame stuff though, it would really depend on what tricks you want to do. with SSX they HAD to do it seperately because some of the tricks you could take your board off your feet and spin around, where as if you didnt have any of those tricks, you could easily get away with it being attatched.

pixeldamage

slipsius wrote: »

Even before reading all the replies, i would have made the board seperate as well. That way you can have the due standing around holding his board at different parts of the game (menus, cut scenes, etc). For the ingame stuff though, it would really depend on what tricks you want to do. with SSX they HAD to do it seperately because some of the tricks you could take your board off your feet and spin around, where as if you didnt have any of those tricks, you could easily get away with it being attatched.

Yeah I decided to have the board and backpack / accessories separate. I mean I would create them that way and keep copies even if i joined them for animations so i would have more flexibility. I think Unity doesn't even read the mesh info from the scenes and just takes out the biped info.