sorry for been an ass and not answer at times (have a new bad habit of ignoring stuff (should get rid of it wille I still can ;P ))

so... wille this far everything was donne following tutorials, animating was the one thing that I didn't understand through them. Animating tutorials aren't that common (every site I went only went as far as rigging and that's it) few animation tutorials around will waste a whole lot of time talking about the weighting =.= and not much straight to subject as for how to make your character look natural...
To start you need to place an HI IK on a bone segment(animation options> IK Solver> HI Solver), IK's work on hierarchys (mainly for bones, but you can place IKs on any hierarchy chain of objects from parent to children(they have to be linked)), IKs pull the bones/objects respecting their distance (except for HD solvers, personally I stay way from them), after doing that, play around with the motion tab, and for each object/bone inside the IK chain you can set angle limits at "hierarchy tab">"IK" just read the options ;) with a little wille it's easy to figure it out.

Laguna is on hold, but is sure to come out eventually (I got too much inspired on the Bahamut model)

hm the Mod tools version that I got was 4.2, since the registration page is nowhere to be found I'll be downloading 6.0 monday and hopefully get a solution for Bahamut (sister is on vacation and complains everytime I try downloading anything, so I need some all-to-myself-internet-time to download mod tools), meanwille I'm tryng to figure out mod tools (doesnt seem dificult, problem is... 2 used to Max, and... meh... I like 3ds ;P ).
Not sure it it's a 4.2 problem but everytime I try removing the 3DSSceneRoot (cutting content bellow it Eclypse said), modtools will give me an error message when tryng to export the file (seens it still exports dispite of not registering nor saving scenes) and when I export without making any changes carcass says it only has 1 frame.

tryng to share time betwem 3ds & Mod Tools
can't stop loving doing these:
EDIT: wops ;P wrong tag (was quote) (actually it's 3ds + photoshop)

kk, can't wait until Bahamut and laguna are done.

If you use Mod Tool 6, be sure to import Bahamut into the program via 3DS format. Trust me, it will make life easier.

Not sure what's up with the animations, and why it's only exporting one frame. Doesn't make any sense to me. You could export the animations to a separate file, and the model to its own file. That might do it, but I'm not entirely sure. I'll look into it and post any information I can find to help you out. :)

hm ;/
I'm clueless

LightNinja, I apreciate the support, as for you opening the exported XSI file it on 3DS 5.0 and tryng to export it again to XSI, but having to do that everytime I'd make a change to the model would be unpractical, even if max didn't take ~10 minutes to export 330 frames (don't wanna picture what would it take tor export ~2k (don't really have an idea on what would be the total frames, some would be longer then those of Humanoid's, but it would certanly have less separate animations)

exported a mesh alone 3ds file format, imported on modtools 6.0
made a provisory (bad) weighting and saved 2 keyframes on bone's motion alone, as global transform.
Set freeze on the mesh but it kept displacing it, so I set "set neutral pose" and freeze again (similar to max resetXform and colapse I guess), select the model_root tree (with only the models mesh and skeleton below it) and attempted to export and compile on assimilate.

If I try exporting and ask it to generate animations from modtools 4.2 carcass gives me the "only 1 frame" error.
If I try it again exporting from modtools 6.0 I get "cubic scale keys" no matter what I do with my regional settings. (yep, tryed changing to English (US) and the, meter/inch and dots (.) and "," thing.

I don't really get XSI mod tools yet, so I don't know if I'm missing something, or doing something wrong, maybe a metric system? maybe I'm not freezing correctly? maybe it is something I can't even get close to imagine... =.=

As for doing it from 3ds, managed to contact Psyk0 who said (unfortunatly) that 3DS Max 6+ don't have reliable exporting plugins and just can't make a proper portable XSI file with animations.

taking suggestions... (specially Minilogoguy's)

in answer to your last question, i sculpted it with Zbrush 3. and it can be used as a normal/displacement map for anything really...

if i decide to put the low poly mesh into jka, it can be used to bake a high res texture, which is pretty cool.

anyway i don't want to distract too much from the project, and i can't really help too much with maganiacs problem, so if you want to see my progress (and the fact that i DO listen to criticism sometimes), here you go:
Video Game Artist and Fan Community: Polycount: UT3 project - Predator

Aaaaaaaaaah! got past the 2 last errors (cubic one, not sure how I went through it and the 1 frame error, this one I do), anyways, on to the next new error!!! 4955 (forgot the actual number, it's the one about operator stack (in max, the modifier stack, when you don't place skin as the last modifier)).
someone thinnk of something! what am I doing wrong? I set freeze on both transform and operator stacks en reenveloped but keeps giving me that O.o

"42.)XSI Import failed, code = 4599

This error happened because the skin modifier is not on top, if you have set UV mapping coordinates on top of the skin modifier, move them down under the skin modifier. It is strongly recommended to UV map before you rig, collapse the stack so it's empty and then apply the skin modifier. ONLY the skin modifier should remain."

It looks like you have to move the UV Mapping operator on top of the skin modifier. From what you had before, it seems as though you rigged and animated the model before you UV Mapped it, so that could be part of what's going on there. I had no idea going out of order made such a huge difference, but apparently it does...who knew!

I know what its like to rip your hair out of your head like that, because I did that when I was trying to learn to model and fix Vincent all at the same time. I can relate, but hey, you prolly didn't think you were going to get through those other ones either. I sure didn't, when it was happening to me, but then again I was a noob, and you're an experienced modeller. ;)

Didn't uvmap it at all, since the model came imported from 3ds and the textures were displayed fine on it I left uvmapping untouched.all I did this with it this faw was add some custom bones, envelop, messed a few transform coordinates, then I got scared of making too many things with ( :P ) so I froze the whole thing and enveloped it again and attempted exporting and compiling (not sureif the LACK of uvmaping could have something to do with it, didnt uvmap it since textures show fine on it, again cuz the model was imported from *.3ds) .

do you think the stack issue from MAX is part of the problem? This is all hypothetical, but lets say that that operator stack on MAX was wrong. You import it into Mod Tool and do everything you need to do, and then because that stack was messed up in MAX, when you import it in, could that issue remain, even if you freeze the mesh? Sadly I don't know enough about it to say one way or the other, and I wish I could see what you see.

You could check out how things are set up in Mod Tool by pressing "8" and checking out the explorer window. That would show you how your modifiers are set up, and could allow you to change the UV Map modifier there, if its just a matter of the hierarchy. All you'd do is drag and drop it where you want it. The default view for the explorer shows every component of the object, so you should be able to find it there. If not, you could remove the textures and mapping entirely, then reapply the textures and map them accordingly(though that is a tremendous pain), and see if that works.

Coolness! how might you do the baking so JKA can read it and so it actually looks like a normal map? (I assume thats what your getting at there) I would love to take the sculpts Ive made In Mudbox/Zbrush (made base mesh in Maya, so I could just take that version to bake the higher one into the texture of...if I worded that right :P) and put them into JKA! I didnt know that a disp map that high in detail could actually render in any current game....but UT3, I dont know about, so thats probably the exception I didnt know about. Could Mayas Surface Sampler be used for that? That turns out the RGB normal map, so thats as far as I know for normal mapping. I dont know how youd go about baking it in...im not gonna kiss ass to find out, buuut...*puppydog eyes*

no you can't use bump. and by extension, normalmaps in jka, which sucks. what i meant though, is that by colouring the high resolution mesh, you can then bake out an almost perfectly realistic texture, it's annoyingly difficult though, so i dunno if i can be bothered with the effort.

but UT3 is where it's currently headed =]

XP Makes sense, JKA sucks too much to do it...I get it now!

Well I'm donne having to stand errors and more errors on carcass tryng to pull this out... that's why they're all behind me now ;)

only has a simple wave head animation with bad weighting (notice chin and wings), but that was really only to make sure the skeleton is on it's correct position and the gla file works fine, in other words, it works, from now on it's really only adding the rest of the bones and IK solvers (or however you call them on XSI), making the animation set, tags, shaders, gfx, sab files... etc... important is, there's probably nothing to stop me anymore ;)

meanwhile leave ya people with a pretty rendered wallpaper 100% 3dsmax (if anyone'd be interested ;P )

Wow... that's awesome o_O

BRAVO Manganiac!!! You truly are a rocket scientist...its official!!! Congrats on getting it to work...I'd love to see how you managed to figure that out, because after you sent me that pic, I was totally scratching my head on where the issue was. I hope I was at least somewhat helpful in your quest for sanity :)

eh... I can't take that much credit for myself, cuz the answers to my errors have pretty much allways been in front of me, I'm the one who took long to realize it...

the "1/2/3 frames only erro" happens on max when you dont have a segment of time with more than ~5 frames, on XSI, it happens when you don't have more than 5 KEY-frames, (so even if you set a keyframe on frame 0, and another on frame 100, you'll still get the 1~2~3 frame error).

the "cubic scale keys" on XSI had NOTHING to do with inches nor dots (windows regional settings) as it does on 3ds, it's actually related to how XSI interpolates the animation cuz, Today's modeling programs interpolate keyframes with some ease in motion, wich means, if you move a object from point A, to B and then C, by default (can be changed), it doesn' do it in straight lines, but in a curve (or spline) that crosses these points. If you remember schools' geometry, that's a cubic function, so to correct that while exporting there will be an option related to animation, check "plot" then in interpolation (it'll be set to spline), change to constant or line.
(took me a while to realize it... ;P "scale keys"<=>"key-frames", duh?!?! (keyframes is pretty much the only thing that has "key" on it's name on any modelling software))

and error 4599 looks like it's related to any stacks in wrong orders, by deleting objects from the scene I ended up isolating the bones, so after all, I deleted them and redid it, (I probably set freeze on my bones at some point while tryng to get rid of cubc scale keys).

EDIT.:if you think about it, it's mostly related to how old JKA is (cuz it was really just a mather of setting the xsi file to a more primitive configuration), wich was kind of susprising to me on how much easy-going XSI/mod tools is, it's almost like it's set to gaming exporting by default xD.

Good job!! :), so now you're gonna animate it from XSI mod tools??

That's what I keep trying to tell people :). If you look at the web page for XSI, it pretty much IS designed for games. It looks like a bunch of gobbledygook when you you first open it, but once you get the hang of it, its actually quite powerful (especially 6, being able to export 64K polys).

Turn to the XSI side, Manganiac...it is your destiny!! :D

yep, couldn't be any other way, max 7 doesn't have the apropriate exporter, so the model reaches the game as a junk of polies, plus even if it did export fine I'll be doing a lot of tests very often every time I change something on the animation and max's xsi exporter takes around 7 minutes to export this model with all it's bones and 330 frames (add ~2k frames and it becomes unpractical), while XSI takes around 1 minute to do the same, I should have seen this coming tho, frames improved a lot this export time... (carcass is still as quick as to any model, it's really only the exporting to xsi file thats taking me long)

YEEEeeeaaaaaaaah! *jumps* xD

can't help it, I really dream of been into game developing, allways knew XSI was the main tool for that, plus I'm already way too found of it, hard to explain, feels more cozy on XSI, may be the shortkeys).
I actually have to go back to modelling & uvmapping lessons on xsi ;P (skiped that xD), tho seens everything I did on max has an equivalent (already saw a pic of splines & cross-sections on XSI's help/turorials, to me that's the main thing, so it's all set :p )

(tho there's 0% chance I abandon max), there's a lot to mess around with it yet (I'm really found of all it's rendering side), makes so many pretty thigns ;3.

lol, i just left max 45 minutes ago, re-importing that (now...) nearly 6 million triangle mesh, and it only just finished...

at least i can rotate around it without lag, i'm anticipating having to hit render and go to sleep when i bake out the normalmaps lol.

:eek::eek::eek:omg dude that friggin amazing cant wait for both of these models

WOW the bahamut looks awsome, Good job. as a matter of interest what's it's poly count up to so far?

And you don't have to. As long as you can get it out of the program in 3DS format, you're in good shape. You could easily model in MAX and rig and animate in XSI. Vincent, Venom and Sephiroth's Remnants were all like that (people sending me their models from MAX to rig), and they turned out just fine :)

so is this gonna be a player model or you gonna replace rancor??? i sure hope its the later

I highly doubt that it will even be-able to be supported in JKA no matter what you make it replace. It's poly count would be way beyond anything JKA could handle.

funny considering this was made for jka so im sure its not to high pol as it was intended for this game assuming he can get the skeleton and animations to work

7122 polies (with wings, tail, everything... except Stupidtriangle_off ... than it'd be 7123 ), an average for jedi academy ;)

my goal here would be not letting the player use it xD only as npc, but I guess multiplayer doesn't let the player play with npc by default, so, all set, as for wich npc I have Kyle in mind, not an issue to be concerned, as long as I give the animations the same labels of those used by the game, it has the same effect that of a mod with edited animations (Off course I'll play around with speed, weapons etc to give him a more individual feeling...

eh... beleave it, I've done enough to know pretty much about JKA's limitations, besides... this model aint havier than any other playable model around there.

I on the other hand, highly doubt it even puxes the engine, at least it didn't:
but hopefully the gfx I have in mind will ;)

sorry for the bad screenies, I'm still figuring out XSI's skeleton rigging, bone-by-bone (FK) animation is not an option, would take forever to give him what I want. it only has a walking animation and it totally sucks

Omg that is cool and npc would be cool but it would be better if it was a player model, maybe if you remove the wings and tail for a player model it wouldn't really "degrade" its originality. because if you made a player model with the wings and tail they might block the view of the player.

Just a suggestion. Very good good though

NEEDS TO BE BIGGAAAAAAARRRR!!!!

i started mine, again... but i keep getting distracted xD once i've got the pred project out of the way i'll finish bahamut and show pics =]

here's an update on the pred btw (starting over from scratch...)

excelent female predator model.
for the ut3 engine im presuming? because you seem to beem about it whenever you mention it.

reminds me of this awesome pred mask i saw today. remove abull mettle mask that had a pred head under it with a mechanical mouth that could growl and move.....was surprisingly light.

actually I'm gonna have to scale DOWN the model on carcass compiling and then scale up the npc (keeps getting stuck on small ledges xD , stuff not even the player himself gets), enough so it'll be around 20% bigger than what it looks right now.

indeed, looks awesome ;)
personally I would go for an anatomy more manga/HQ appealing (like the body of the Predator Queen someone posted up polycount ), with smaller chest and bigger hips, but I know how obsessed you are with realistic anatomy, so, no point discussin that ;P

Predator gotta be one of the coolest most original character concepts ever (not talking about design alone)
does this have anything to do with AvP2 coming xD? (this time, it wont be censored, thats a start)

AvP2, is gonna blow chunks... since when do preds kill unarmed women?

but yeah, it's one of the things that sparked me off :P

idk they kinda killed everyone in predator 2

er... no they didn't.

the first time the predator is seen in a scene involving anyone unarmed, is when the voodoo posse bust in on the columbian druglord shagging some woman, it kills everyone with a weapon and the woman is left in a corner, visibly in shock, repeating "the devil came for them" in spanish...

then later on, it saw the female cop (who was shooting at it) was pregnant, unarmed her, and walked off.

also, in the novels, predators live by a very strict code of conduct. female preds are more diminant than males (young male preds usually don't survive mating). the hunt is all that matters to them, and it has to be done honorably,

huh gess i need to see the movies again though that mask still kicked ass

I like they seemed to try to combine elements from first and second movie, Predator movies (seens to start on forest and move to a more civilized area).
Can't be bad... After all, the only thing that ruined AVP1 was a silly main Predator with a cross-species cruch...

eh... xD ... ah, Predator 2 really didn't really have the best mask xP had puppy eyes and it was BIG, and it's that movie's fault that Predators gained... P<self-sensored>ies... inside their mouths... mate you need to watch them again xD just compare it, the First one's mask with any other
Predator I's mask beats all of them, even the recent ones (they look like rubber, and they seem not to work properly xD) ...

no im talking about the one i saw in the costume store today. It was a mechanical mask that you would ware and it could move and growl. Also came with the metal helmet.

the first one had a fanny for a mouth too :P

there was a lot that was bad about AvP1... like, how 2 preds managed to get wiped out in like 5 minutes of action, when in the books it takes about 5 aliens literally swarming all a pred to take it down, considdering how a pred can literally punch an alien skull open.

their metals are impervious to the alien acid, it was developed specifically for hunting aliens.

a predator CAN survive being impaled through the chest, for up to 15 minutes afterward. they are stupid strong, heavy, but also stupidly fast (cheetah speed).

so... they totally nurfed a species which is, as the name suggests, the top of the food chain.

the interacial action was second only to a weird pterodactyl porno i saw once.

and as much as i love predators, that queen would have torn him to shreds, no questions asked. the queens were always kept under high guard, and if it looked like she might even have a thought of escaping, she would be killed, and they would capture a new alien to evolve.

oh, and here's some low poly lovin'

about 6000 tris

going for 9000 with weapons/armour included.

ok, model and it's skeleton is pretty much done and weighted (was'nt working on animation yet, had to check how to rig the model on xsi (Inverse kinematics (IK chains) and some other really cool stuff ;)
spent the weekend checking tutorials on how to do that.
now, if ya people don't mind, I could use a list of all require stuff, whatever you think of that a model needs to access most of the game's support, like tags, animation's names (I can find some animation's names through modviewer but if anyone would happen to know faster wich animation
's name do I require, I'd apreciate as well)

ps.: I set bolt_r_hand tags to the right hand and bolt_l_hand tag to left, and weighted, but it doesn't show sabers in the game (won't use sabers, but I'm pretty sure I need these tags to set the melee weapons), anyone has a clue of what am I missing? (even a wampa holds sabers, so if give it just the right stuff, it will work).

on another note, can a weapon be redirected to another tag? I mean, if I give him a Mega-Flare weapon, can I set it to a mouth tag instead or the bolt_r_hand? if not, that could be a problem... (when it works ;P ) (ps.:I know there's supposed to be a right_hang_bone or something like that, but does wampa have it?, cuz if he doesn't than it wouldn't be required...)

on a last note (hehe xP ) some npcs switch weapons, I think that can be worked (though that could be code writen, wich would become another problem), but is there a weapon limit that a NPC can carry? (some npcs carry 2 weapons, but again, that could be coded... it may not work on a Kyle npc (the one I'm using))
if I'm not wrong, the Kyle npc is set to carry a saber and the disruption rifle (not sure of name, the one that shots red xP ), but you never see him actually switching weapons in combat...

no idea how to help, it's not something i've ever tried with jka, sorry xD

this post is really just for anyone who's interested in the progression from low-high poly, and blocking out forms etc.

u added [/img] x2 times but still it looks awsome

Coming back to this thread cuz the old one about tags has nothing more to add, by that I mean, tags are working now.
Actually, I've been right all along ;)
JKA both gives support to vehicle tags at the same time it prevents non-humanoid models from doing, eh, humanoid stuff, how do I know that? took a look at the code ;)

http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/604...tbadassct9.jpg

Hoth's hot breath too ;) (wich confirms that all tags are working)
plus he's staring the player in the correct angle now xD (was having problems with that too)
http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/9...badass2xw2.jpg

NOW I can animate Big B. without wondering if it's gonna work, cuz itwill ;) (yep, my ego is pretty high right now)

me want bahemuth looks awsome and lol at tiny saber heh
and me want namekian model pack looks awsome

u sir did a great job

thanks, eh the tiny saber is just to make sure the tags of the model work, by the time I do 50% of the animations I'll work on a claw-ish-strike-looking saber, otherwise I would have to use the weapon WP_MELEE (wich has no effects neither timing, neither does it work it's area damage like a lightsaber would, it's more like an area of dmg created in front of the model/player/npc)

okay good luck :p

if you pull this off it will be quite an impressive fret as no one has ever added a new skeleton quite this before with all 24000+ frames of animation

there's not a chance I'll pull more than 2000 frames, that's just a ridiculous amount of work...
besides, it's not really necessary, JK has that much cuz everything is framed, for instance, there's a forward attack, but if after a forward attack you do another, there's a extra animation betwen these two, to give it the continuous feeling, there's an extra animation that interpolates a left swing into a right swing, into a front, etc... picture that for every direction you attack, there's an extra animation for each in-betwen move to all other directions, multiply it by the diferent styles, all sets of animations a certain general number of frames and you have a really huge amount of animations. for instance, Wampa has ~800 frames, rancor has ~3000
I'll see what I'll pull out of this, from now on it's just bonus ;)

Good stuff, I'm pretty interested in how you got the tags working though I've never looked if the tags of my animated models worked properly. The saber tag working makes me wanna do a cavern troll :p..

Good job ;)

wow, looking' good