Heads bones, animation, eyelid - any tutorials?

Started by bitterman, April 21, 2016, 10:30:36 PM

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motorsep

Doom 3 never had too many tutorials to begin with. Nothing about the subject is available. Your best bet is to grab mars_city1 and see how it's done with NPCs.

aphexjh

Here is a piece of information about the eye material and how the eye movement is accomplished:

QuoteEach eyeball surface should have an separate upright triangle behind it, long end pointing out the eye, and another single triangle in front of the eye for the focus point. The texture coordinates on the eyeball surface will be deformed so that the center is lined up with the vector going from the origin triangle to the focus triangle.
which is from here
https://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/materials.php

Also you might want to check out the SDK which had some maya files with the game's rigs, these might show you how to do the skeletal and modeling work, but it will take some studying and reverse engineering. Not to mention converting and working with importer/exporter scripts, which may not be fun for you. But who knows, maybe you like pain. Either way, its a good reference for making animated character rigs, if a bit old school at this point.
http://www.the-emz.com/download/
but I really don't know what all can be done, very likely the Dark Mod guys would have the best idea about that
Here is someplace to start :
http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Getting_Characters_and_their_Anims_into_Doom
Good luck, and if you find something out, please feel free to enlighten the rest of us.

bitterman

Thanks for the answers, guys.

Another piece from darkmod:

QuoteLooking at some code, it looks like if the spawnarg "eye_height" does not exist, and the AI has an attached head, D3 will automatically set the eye height to coincide with a joint on the head that you specify in spawnargs (I think on the AI spawnargs, not the head spawnargs).

The spawnarg keys to set are these:

"bone_leftEye" "<name of left eye joint on head MD5 mesh>"
"bone_rightEye" "<name of right eye joint on head MD5 mesh>"


This might save us a lot of time. Theoretically we can get rid of the eye_height spawnarg and set these spawnargs to the correct joint name and it automatically sets the eye height to the eyes on the head, regardless of whether that AI is tall or short, or how the head is attached.

And bonus (this is campbell's head from id):


caedes

Quote from: motorsep on April 22, 2016, 12:34:19 AM
Doom 3 never had too many tutorials to begin with. Nothing about the subject is available. Your best bet is to grab mars_city1 and see how it's done with NPCs.
I think Doom3world had several tutorials.

:-/

The Happy Friar

On heads specifically?  I've done heads for monsters but always integrated, never separate models.  I never could figure it out (found it easier to do it the "old" way).

If you can find one on on the internet archive we can get it here.

bitterman

QuoteI think Doom3world had several tutorials.

I'm pretty sure I seen there the tutorial about bones of the head wich must have the same name as some of the bones of the body.

However, it is possible to figure out the analysis of .md5mesh.

QuoteI've done heads for monsters but always integrated, never separate models.

Separate animation channel, talking heads, tracking the eye at the object, focusing, cinematics -  separate heads provide these features, as I see from the original game.

caedes

Quote from: The Happy Friar on April 24, 2016, 09:32:52 PM
On heads specifically?
No idea if on heads, but generally it had lots of tutorials that seem to be lost.

The things of d3w that were preserved by archive.org can be found on https://modwiki.xnet.fi/doom3world/ but it's very incomplete :-(

motorsep

Eyelids have only one anim - blink.

All the looking around / nodding, etc. is done on the body skeleton, and those anims are copied to head bones. Facial anim is only done on NPCs and I forgot if it's something specific or just playing anim on the head entity. Monsters' head is a part of the body and have no facial anims.

bitterman