I need help animating a marine.
Posted: Sat Jul 22, 2006 4:30 pm
Hi again.
So, one of the characters in my film has to be a human, and not the master chief, so I thought I'd go with an unarmored marine.
I got the tags, skinned him the way I liked, plopped him in my map, and thought I was ready to go until I found that marine animations are fairly limited, and didn't quite work for what I had in mind.
So I exported his model, imported it into 3ds max, created a biped and conformed it to the marine model and made up some animations.
Thing is, once I got the new animations into the game, things worked fairly well except that no matter what the animations were, the marine's head would become grossly deformed.
I did some experiments and found that one part of the biped (the ponytail) acts as the marines jaw, so if you leave the ponytail where it is when you create the biped (on the back of the head), the marine's mouth with suck down to the back of his head.
The tricky thing is, the ponytail seems to act as both a reference for the jaw and the brow; his whole face really.
I was able to transform the ponytail enough so that his brow didn't crush down, but the jaw was still wacked.
What I'm wondering is A. has anyone ever sucessfully animated a marine before, and if so, how.
And B. how can you edit the specific parts of a biped? I selected the ponytail and converted it to an editable mesh and worked it around as best I could to make it look like a jaw and not just a fat lollypop (that's what it looks like initially). Only thing was, when I exported the animation, and compile it, the nodes were no longer correct. I guess by converting the ponytail, it removed it from the node list (whatever the hell that is), meaning that the animations wouldn't match the model.
So, I guess I need to find a way to de-convert from an editable mesh to whatever it is that an element of a biped is when it's created.
I know that this is kinda confusing, but I hope someone can help me out here.
Thanks.
So, one of the characters in my film has to be a human, and not the master chief, so I thought I'd go with an unarmored marine.
I got the tags, skinned him the way I liked, plopped him in my map, and thought I was ready to go until I found that marine animations are fairly limited, and didn't quite work for what I had in mind.
So I exported his model, imported it into 3ds max, created a biped and conformed it to the marine model and made up some animations.
Thing is, once I got the new animations into the game, things worked fairly well except that no matter what the animations were, the marine's head would become grossly deformed.
I did some experiments and found that one part of the biped (the ponytail) acts as the marines jaw, so if you leave the ponytail where it is when you create the biped (on the back of the head), the marine's mouth with suck down to the back of his head.
The tricky thing is, the ponytail seems to act as both a reference for the jaw and the brow; his whole face really.
I was able to transform the ponytail enough so that his brow didn't crush down, but the jaw was still wacked.
What I'm wondering is A. has anyone ever sucessfully animated a marine before, and if so, how.
And B. how can you edit the specific parts of a biped? I selected the ponytail and converted it to an editable mesh and worked it around as best I could to make it look like a jaw and not just a fat lollypop (that's what it looks like initially). Only thing was, when I exported the animation, and compile it, the nodes were no longer correct. I guess by converting the ponytail, it removed it from the node list (whatever the hell that is), meaning that the animations wouldn't match the model.
So, I guess I need to find a way to de-convert from an editable mesh to whatever it is that an element of a biped is when it's created.
I know that this is kinda confusing, but I hope someone can help me out here.
Thanks.