The man with the Machine gun

[Manganiac]

Originally Posted by Gir_teh_Almighteh

actually, jka was very very inefficient with its animation frames, some of them have like 100, when they only needed 30.

you can have as many frames as you like in an animation anyway =]

good to know =3

Originally Posted by Szico VII

That animation looks very nice - just like the one in FFX.

I'd love to openly accept that compliment... but eh... FF's animations feel a "lot" more natural (notice the enfasys?) hey, at least mine laughs at the end
anyways Thanks =D

Originally Posted by Eclypse

Very nice! You gotta show me how you do that one of these days

on 3ds, press "n" on your keyboard, (activates auto-key-framing(status bar goes red), wich in it's default state will save diferent positions of your objects in a particular selected frame(time), move your time-line back and forth and set these diferent positions, you'll do better if you press "k" (that forces 3ds to save a frame on the current time-line (cuz in auto-key-only mode the frame-saving is done automatically everytime you make a change), 3ds will interpolate the frames betwen key-frames, also, keyframes will only be displayed on the time-line once you have selected their objects (keyframes set wille selecting the model's head will not show when you select the model's torso). Make sure your auto-key is ON whenever you want to make a motion (or you will mess the model's default position, wich will affect permanently all the animation, so it's also a good idea to save a diferent file before doing animations...). I hear a lot about XSI doing it better (in fact, mod tools might do it at least as good as max (if you exclude rendering)...)
All-in-all, it's pretty much the principle of any of today's animation programs, "key-frames and interpolations", 3ds, xsi, flash, even Adobe Image Reday does it that way
(this is the basic tho, it'd help if I could understand how to properly relate bones and their movements (IK solvers & controlers))

Originally Posted by Anakin992

I was about to mention that the animation did look nice. I was expecting him to just twist his torso or something. It looks nice, and I'm glad the mouth is actually moving. So your giving this guy 100% custom animations?

thanks ;3
since there's "not a chance" that I'd use JKA's custom humanoid skeleton, there's no reason to hold back either...

[Gir_teh_Almighteh]

manganiac, add me to MSN, and i'll see if i can help you some with your animation.

[Manganiac]

eh... wille it'd be interesting to have such a support, doing Bahamut isn't the kind of think that I'd allow myself to be helped, I bet you know the feeling Gir
eh, Bahamut is one of the reasons why I started modelling, wille I am no longer the kind of fan I was years ago, I pretty much still owe to the character. I wrote on the readme of my first submited file that i'd try to come out with Bahamut eventually ( GrayDragon, Jedi Knight 3 Downloads, Jedi Knight 3 Others ) , not sure if I'm ready (or have the skills/guts) to do so, but I'm not gonna wait forever either...
Just hope I can get the correct directions

[Eclypse]

Originally Posted by Manganiac

eh... wille it'd be interesting to have such a support, doing Bahamut isn't the kind of think that I'd allow myself to be helped, I bet you know the feeling Gir
eh, Bahamut is one of the reasons why I started modelling, wille I am no longer the kind of fan I was years ago, I pretty much still owe to the character. I wrote on the readme of my first submited file that i'd try to come out with Bahamut eventually ( GrayDragon, Jedi Knight 3 Downloads, Jedi Knight 3 Others ) , not sure if I'm ready (or have the skills/guts) to do so, but I'm not gonna wait forever either...
Just hope I can get the correct directions

Whatever it is you don't have, my good man...the good folks here can certainly help you find it

Far as XSI animation goes, I just learned how to do it today. Here's a link on a tutorial:

XSI Animation - Valve Developer Community

I've broiled it down to a few steps, which I can post if needed. However, I can't get the anims out of XSI and compiled into Carcass. I keep getting errors. That's posted in the Mod Tool 6 error thread, so I won't go hijacking this one!

[Anson992]

Doing it yourself? Good for you.... and I can't wait to see what else you do. I know what you mean about not wanting to be helped, being the way I am I can get like that sometimes too depending on what it is I'm doing.

However, as long as you post your progress, me, Gir, and anyone else.... we're gonna crit your work to the best of our ability, telling you whats good, and what isn't in our own opinions. Its your choice to take the advice, but we won't be telling you how to do it, just helping you so you can do it the way you want, and that looks good.

[Gir_teh_Almighteh]

well, the monitor on my "creative" machine (i have 3 pc's... 1 for gaming 1 for modeling, and this one which is like... well it's like the ingrown hair on the ass of the pc world) went 'asplode! so the help i'm offering is purely critical, and advicive (like, i'll be able to tell you which frames you do and don't need, how to make it look more flowing etc.)

anywho, i'll get a new monitor ASAP, and when i do i'll take screenshots of what i've done so far (be aware that primarily i'm making mine for unreal 3, so it's very high resolution at the moment.), when i'm completely finished, i'll think about releasing the low poly mesh + animations, so someone else can texture him.

[Manganiac]

HELP
I'm not yet done with uvmaping the model (wich btw has been a headache, too many distortions on the texture maping), but I wanted to test animating it with constrains and helpers, problem: can't get max to mirror the bones and constrains properly:
Not a single axis makes 3DSMax mirror them in the world/grid axis, allways seens to mirror bones localy, it also doesn't mirror the helpers (dummies) position on world axis, tryed changing that parent/local/world/viewport/grid thing for every mirror attempt but still no proper mirroring...
(I'm almost sure that mod tools will do this without much trouble (since XSI gives better animation support) and that I'll be able to animate it properly only after exporting the file to xsi. (Just want to finish this model & Laguna's before moving to XSI).

Spoiler:

Basically each axis mirrors the bones & helpers in a desastrous way (the bunch of bones at the models left thigh (viewers' right thigh) is one of these desastrous ways).

[Gir_teh_Almighteh]

ok, i used to remember how to mirror them properly, but as a quick fix:

mirror them as you are right now, but before you do, right click the bones you want to mirror and click the little box next to "move" and copy the figure you see for the x axis (assuming you're mirroring the mesh along that axis too). Then, mirror them, right click the new selection, move, paste, and more importantly, if the number you pasted is negative, make it positive, if positive, make it negative. your bones will now be mirrored exactly.

you might have to re-link the top bone though, i can't remember if cloning bones keeps the parent link intact or not.

oh, and never ever clone as an instance

[Manganiac]

hm... weird enough... seens... max can't handle it's own constrains & helpers?... really only got to properly mirror both bones and helpers when I deleted the constrains betwen them... and still doesn't get to mirror both at same time (had to mirror the group of bones first, and then the group of helpers... cuz max doesn't let you group bones & helpers all in a single group) and now I'll have to set the constrains all over again...

[Eclypse]

Originally Posted by Manganiac

hm... weird enough... seens... max can't handle it's own constrains & helpers?... really only got to properly mirror both bones and helpers when I deleted the constrains betwen them... and still doesn't get to mirror both at same time (had to mirror the group of bones first, and then the group of helpers... cuz max doesn't let you group bones & helpers all in a single group) and now I'll have to set the constrains all over again...

OK, I'm going to sound like a total noob, but just making your own skeleton for this is purely impressive! However, one thing to consider when doing so, is that you will likely have to edit/create every single animation for JKA, which is in the realm of 21000+ anims. A lot of people have thought "hey, why doesn't someone make a new skeleton for capes?" Problem being, you have to add those bones to the animation set in order for them to work properly with the other animations. Otherwise, you'll get a crappy error message from JKA saying "bad bone or animation sequence" and your model will be Kyle.

Again, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, and it could just be a matter of naming the bones the right things so that the program at least percieves that the bones are in order.

Oh, and you may want to wait on UV Mapping until you get it into XSI. Sometimes the maps don't translate so well when you move from 3DS. And, you don't have to export it as XSI to get it into XSI, .3DS will do (though make sure you apply your smoothing groups before you export ). Another thing I just realized is that the bones will turn to nulls on import, so it seems you can either continue to make it in MAX and just do everything in max, or export the mesh into XSI and build your skeleton from there. Or you could just weigh it using the nulls...hell I did that for a while, and its a pain, but it still works.