Setting up props with animation the easy way.

Wahlgren

Hey guys. Lately I've been getting into animating my props and such (It's awesome!) and I was thinking of writing up some stuff from my latest "play around with stuff and do cool shit at home"-sessions.

Maybe some stuff on how to do some easy animations and how to set it up in max and get it into UDK the easy fast way without any issues. Interested or should I just not bother?

Granted. It's very easy stuff if you know how to do it but it also seems like many enviro artists never do this and I wanna see more of this stuff. It's also something you kinda have to know these days I've noticed. So yeah, just trying to spread some knowledge baby!

It's this box-thing I'll be using.


Youtube videos and wip's on the blawg in my sig.

Looking forward to hear your thoughts. Rock on.

Oniram

neat stuff. i agree that any env artist could benefit from this.

fearian

I've always stayed away from animation - Rigging in school was a painful ugly tedious process I hated. But I realize I should learn some of the basics! And I'd like to have some animated stuff in my environments!

So yeah, definitely interesting. But still a little scary.

Wahlgren

Cool. My first post text was a bit hard to read but I blame it on having to type fast and being a bit sick. Heh.

At least now I know that a few people would be interested in it. Shouldn't take to long but there's lots of stuff to do at work this week so it might take a few days extra.


EDIT: It's not gonna be so much "how to animate", It's gonna be more along the lines of how to set it up and get it properly into UDK. I could still show you a bit of the basic stuff I used to animate it tho.

Justin Meisse

fearian: don't worry, most of the time the rigging and skinning involved with environment stuff is pretty simple.

Wahlgren: look forward to seeing how it's done, i've only dabbled in UDK so far.

Rico

I would love to see write up on this man, definitely!

The animation was pretty rad, by the way!

Xoliul

Cool, i did this stuff quite a bit too some months ago, had to teach a class on it.
I should ask here again (UDK forum is terribly silent):

How the F** do you combine animations? I never got that! I followed this completely: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MatineeAnimControlTrack.html and it didn't work. It only wants to show one animation. I wanna be able to do simple mechanical things to make creating cutscenes easier: have a few generic, simple animations and then combine them (like animation for vehicle driving + animation for turret rotating + animation for barrel firing or something).
Would be cool if we could figure that out here boys

Oniram

in the udn tutorial, not sure about the animtree part, but so long as your animations are within the same animset, putting them together in matinee as shown there should work.

maybe ill do a few tests tonight.

Wahlgren

Xoliul wrote: »

Cool, i did this stuff quite a bit too some months ago, had to teach a class on it.
I should ask here again (UDK forum is terribly silent):

How the F** do you combine animations? I never got that! I followed this completely: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MatineeAnimControlTrack.html and it didn't work. It only wants to show one animation. I wanna be able to do simple mechanical things to make creating cutscenes easier: have a few generic, simple animations and then combine them (like animation for vehicle driving + animation for turret rotating + animation for barrel firing or something).
Would be cool if we could figure that out here boys

Actually not quite sure about that one. It's a bit more on the high-end advanced side (I'm on the low-end noob one). I know you can place them together in the Matinee quite easily and possibly play them all upp together (Should work?) but the whole animtree thing is something I haven't messed around with really.

Would be nice to see how someone did it though.

Justin Meisse

I think that box should have a Ham sandwich and a pint of beer inside it

Wahlgren

Got a first draft up. Wasn't planning on showing it publically this early but it's the only way to get crits and iron out the kinks since most of my MSN and Facebook is full of people that doesn't give a fuck.

I'll be doing changes to it and elaborate more as needed. It's a bit more text than I expected but yeah, not much to do about that I guess.

As you might have guessed I'm not a native english speaker so if i need to phrase something differently or if there's a spelling error, etc just tell me.

http://whalebranch.blogspot.com/2011/02/boxis-guide-to-animated-objects-in-udk.html

Note: This tutorial is not on how to animate, just how to get it into UDK. I know people are interested in the animation-part too so I might make a short guide for that depending on how this one is received. It's pretty easy... after all, I did it!

(i would of course use a more fancy mesh , maybe a vault door etc)

rasmus

Nice one, thanks. About the grouping, do you mean that all objects just have to be in a single group? Also, just to make sure, this is a straight-up FK animation of a series of linked objects, right?

Wahlgren

Yup both times. Have everything in one group to make sure it gets exported.

It's all easy peasy FK with linked objects, it's the way to go man! I've got some dummies in there aswell but that's just to see and animate things easier.

rasmus

Cool, that's all I want to hear

Lamont

Xoliul wrote: »

Cool, i did this stuff quite a bit too some months ago, had to teach a class on it.
I should ask here again (UDK forum is terribly silent):

How the F** do you combine animations? I never got that! I followed this completely: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MatineeAnimControlTrack.html and it didn't work. It only wants to show one animation. I wanna be able to do simple mechanical things to make creating cutscenes easier: have a few generic, simple animations and then combine them (like animation for vehicle driving + animation for turret rotating + animation for barrel firing or something).
Would be cool if we could figure that out here boys

I can make a sample scene in Maya and send it back with bundled UDK files (Dec Build).

Lamont

Ok, finally got some spare time. Will make a sample UPK w/mesh and animations... and put all scripts needed. Need to get some coffee in my system first...

Lamont

http://cgbylg.com/FTP/AnimMeshTut.zip

In that file, you will find all assets used. You will also see the UPK. BUT you will need to make the game (Follow Hourences tut) and add this class (In the UDK folder). Then when you place the pawn, it will play that default (idle) animation (use a factory to spawn). The only way I know how to control AniTree is by Unreal Script and it's this way (using key-presses and console events).

If you just want to blend animations for a cutscene, save the headache and just do it in your app of choice. I can't think of a friendly way of doing this, and I guess that's why it's not really covered much.

Froyok

"MechaDildo"
"The Phaladon"

Man, I fucking love your tutorial !

Lamont

Gotta wedge in a penis joke somehow, or it just won't feel like PolyCount.