Trooper Third Person Animation List

Something to keep myself organized. I'll be adding more as time goes on. Feel free to add anything I missed or suggestions.

Rolls? Or is that the same as Crouch Strafe?
I'll add this to the GDD (still indev). good stuff.

I don't think we need run strafe (and maybe backwards), do we?
And I think you can remove Sprint or Run from the pistol.
And we'll need the same for rifles and later for some other types of weapons, too.
Most likely some rifles will need adjusted animations to prevent clipping.
Reloading most likely will be different per weapon unless the location of the mag is very similar.

Well remove sprint for weapons yes, but run is needed for every weapon i think. people usually run in FPS's.
Yeah, note to modellers, try to get the same trigger and mag locations on similair weapons (2 groups i can think of are assault rifles and pistols.) to help out the animators from doing a lot of extra work. It also helps with memory optimizations. 3 anims loaded run faster than 12.

Got one placeholder done so far, but I forgot and spent too much time on it. I'll be spending a lot less time on the other placeholders to get them done. In the meantime, I'm reading up on animation layering and how to blend animations in the sdk.

For now, I'm removing walks from from the list since it seems pointless when there is crouching. Let me know if it should be left on.

Been working on some more placeholders and got them working in-game. I'm still trying to figure out why some animations are playing slower than they actually are. I recorded a sample here: https://vimeo.com/55985458


Also slowly learning how to use the animation graph though it is a bit too technical for me. I'm not sure how to implement additional weapons either so I'll keep working on basic movement for now (finishing placeholders and getting reference for finalizing).

I like you!
Nice work, at least for placeholders. And a lot of work, too!

I can take a look at animation graphs, too, if needed.

Do you have skype? If you do, most of us posted their names in the Contact subforum here. Feel free to add us, we have a group chat for the team, too.

Nice, you should post that on polycount to get advices, i don't know much in animations.

I like it but I think he's knees are too close together when he runs which looks a bit weird.

Apart from that, they're nice!

Pretty much done with basic movement placeholders for now. I left out some things such as stance transitions and death animations since those aren't important right now. Not too worried about animation at this point since placeholders are just for frame counts and setting up an animation graph. I also had to make a new animation graph since the default one has issues with custom animations. It's working pretty well now and I learned a lot about graphs making my own.

I can now start actual animation and maybe skin the trooper model to see how well the animations carry over.

Great!
What might be important now is some placeholders for one weapon. You can use the a280_scaled_ingame.obj as size reference.
I'll upload one of the troopers as .obj or .fbx later, too.

When you've got one weapon placeholder you can upload the animations + animation graph to the dropbox. Then I'll implement it into the game.

Quick question: how do I implement custom weapons in-game? I tried using the weapon XML files from dropbox but I'm still stuck with the default SCAR/Launcher. I assume I'm still missing something.

You need to edit the Equipment Pack(s), too (stores which weapons you have). I've added a SinglePlayer.xml file to SW BattleCry\Game\Libs\EquipmentPacks\, copy that over to your folder.

Then what you'll really need is the SWBC\game\scripts\entities\items\XML\weapons folder and the Bin64\CryGame.dll for the weapon/ammo implementation.
For the models you need SWBC\game\objects\starwars\weapons.
For the particle FX SWBC\game\Libs\Particles\battlecry_weapons.xml.
For the sounds SWBC\game\sounds\battlecry_weapons.

If you're on a 32bit system the weapons most likely won't work as I haven't compiled a 32bit CryGame.dll yet.

If you catch me (Ben/Ben T) online on Skype I can talk you through the setup process if needed.

It's all working now, thanks.

Ran into a big problem while setting up the Aim IK system. For some reason, the joint orientations of the spine flipped when I exported the character to cryengine. This isn't a big problem for normal animations but for Aim IK, it becomes a mess.


I can fix the twisting issue, but the main problem is when you aim up, the character aims down and vice versa. I tried reorienting the joints and reexporting but the x-axis always points down for some reason.

It is fine before exporting:


Flips after exporting:


I tried asking around on the crydev forums but no luck. I am going to try to export a new character to see where the problem comes from. Hopefully I wont have to redo the rig setup.

Yeah, that seems quite weird.

If you don't get a response on the forums, try the IRC channel: http://source.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?f=126&t=68623&start=0

Is it aligned correctly on the (y-axis i think), in Max\Maya?

I got the problem fixed after I asked the creator of the maya exporter about the problem. Turns out Maya flips it during export and I had to adjust the local rotation axis and not the joint orients.

The bad news is that I have to repaint skin weights and make new placeholders which shouldn't be a problem. I'm just glad I'm not stuck any more.

Glad to hear it worked out okay in the end Terach, thanks for the work you're putting in!

The IRC channel I linked is really handy, if you ever need to chat, I recommend using it. That and Skype.

Very good. I like your style of working.
Keep it up, you're doing great (and a lot of) work!

Sorry I haven't updated in a while. Recently started an internship and been busy. I'm still working on Aim IK and it's slowly coming together. Also rerigging and reskinning the character. Here's a little sample of what I've been working on.

Looks good
Could you post a vid of switching between the different poses?

I think the rifle has to be scaled down a bit. If that is the exact .obj from the dropbox then scale it so it fits the troopers hands better and tell me by how much you scaled it. Then I can apply that to the ingame model.

Looking good man. Slowly it's all coming together.

@sceluk I haven't redone any of the old animation yet. I want to make sure that the Aim IK works 100% with my current rig first so I don't have to redo animations if I have to change the rig again.

@ande Yeah I did have to scale it down to about 0.9.

Sorry guys, I haven't made any further progress with the aiming problem. I've gone through pretty much every solution I could find for Maya and went through the documentation pretty closely. So far I've tried: reorienting the joints in the skeleton, fixing the aim poses, used the default skeleton with no changes, built a completely new skeleton from scratch. All of which result in a similar problem: https://vimeo.com/58285361 (pw: swbc)

The problem itself is probably in the Maya exporter. It should be able to export the default agent character from the sample assets file, but it flips the joints around and becomes unusable for custom animations. I think 3DS has better compatibility with CE3 for exporting characters, but I don't know enough 3DS or rigging to try. I'm not sure where to go from here and I feel kinda bad letting this one problem keep me from working.