Animations

[smoth]

we have upspring zpock, and it has animation capabilities but it has issues when you try to rotate past 100 degrees.

[KDR_11k]

Please try animating with a good 3d package or even just Blender once and then come back and tell me Upspring is good enough.

I used skeletal animation a lot before I came to Spring. It's really a huge difference. The kind of simple, stiff anim you get after hours in Scriptor can be done in minutes in Blender.

BTW zpock, I'm in favour of skeletal anim and using existing formats to use it, why did you quote my post for your rebuttal?

[smoth]

3dsmax6 rigged and animated but meh. Notice that he was posed and all, hell you can even see the bone coming out of his hand.

I have done it before. I hated all the irritating crap with that idiotic bubble crap. I tried to play in blender a bit but saw no way to export the anims in a way to use with spring, so I gave up on blender.

Uspring allows me to move parts then play the animation adjusting along the way. If I could rotate correctly and it didn't crash as much(may have been fixed by now) I would be pretty happy with upspring.

*edit* I am not saying that support for an animation format wouldn't be sweet, I would fight any animation format that requires the purchase of something like maya/3dsmax though. It is just that the 100+ rotation does need to be fixed for many reasons and I can animate in upspring. It seems like that is a smaller more reasonable request then a whole new animation format.

[Zpock]

Please try animating with a good 3d package or even just Blender once and then come back and tell me Upspring is good enough.

I used skeletal animation a lot before I came to Spring. It's really a huge difference. The kind of simple, stiff anim you get after hours in Scriptor can be done in minutes in Blender.

BTW zpock, I'm in favour of skeletal anim and using existing formats to use it, why did you quote my post for your rebuttal?

Oh, I was agreeing with you 100% and trying to build onto your point.

Fixing upspring wouldn't hurt either, it's all up to whoever has the skills to actually do it in the end. It's just that as a would be animator I don't like the idea of setting up animations in upspring frame by frame, the animation for complex leg movement and body bouncing would never be as smooth as one setup with an IK system to follow animation paths and take tons of more time, if at all possible.

[smoth]

Do we want to spend our effort on making a simple graphical editor to make this process slightly easier or find a way to tap into the existing tools and stuff that exist?

was what I was primarily replying to. Seemed like a fixed upspring would serve that purpose. Or was I taking the example too literally?

[Zpock]

*edit* I am not saying that support for an animation format wouldn't be sweet, I would fight any animation format that requires the purchase of something like maya/3dsmax though. It is just that the 100+ rotation does need to be fixed for many reasons and I can animate in upspring. It seems like that is a smaller more reasonable request then a whole new animation format.

Isn't there some open source FPS engine we could steal a well established setup that could use exports from all the animation programs including free options like blender?

[smoth]

Maybe quake3 has something. It has skeletals last I recall and it is open source but I am not sure about license compatibility.

[Zpock]

I guess .MD5 is an option to look into?

Some information on how it works:
http://tfc.duke.free.fr/coding/md5-specs-en.html

Would be great to hear what someone who has more knowledge in the field of FPS engines and game animation would say.

[KDR_11k]

Q3A is GPL

I think some sourceports (engine replacements) for some quake games can handle Doom3's MD5 format, that's pretty well supported AFAIK.

[Sheekel]

how difficult would it be to code SERVO to handle .s3os? And have click-and-drag joints?

[smoth]

servo is inferior to upspring and upspring can animation just that it just cannot rotate past 100+

[rattle]

It's exactly 120° where it breaks by the way.
Yeah I found servo to be more complicated than upspring.

[Sheekel]

is there a tutorial on the upspring drag-and-animate feature? (is this how it actually works btw?)

[smoth]

not likely but if it gets fixed I could probably use fraps and make a how to video.

[jcnossen]

Aside from the exporting and angles problems,
you can better animate in another editor and then import using BVH. Creating animations in upspring is really incomplete, you can only add animation keys and not delete them.

Also, I compiled a new upspring with euler angles. See the upspring thread: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=7208&p=276728#p276728

[Zpock]

What is BVH?

[smoth]

IIRC it was used for mocap.

[rattle]

Max can export animations to BHV if I remember correctly, Blender might as well.