I have been looking at creating characters for Reloaded that don't conform to the generic biped, or simply older/any biped models rigged to the animations available and running around with a pistol or whatever.



I have no use for Animer and loading up old stock characters to rig to the only available animations list that will work as default in Reloaded.



I have just spent an entire day and night simply trying to get my character to display properly in Reloaded with a major struggle which entailed messing around with envelopes which appear absolutely fine in Max and Fragmotion only to find the model warping out when loaded into FPSCR. This exploding vertex issue was something often seen in Classic and shader related. The character has additional bones, horselinks for the legs and wings which took it over the bonematrix limit in the shader, increasing the limit had some effect but then the model won't display textures properly so I had to strip out a number of bones from both the wings and the biped to get it down to a count Reloaded was willing to accept.



After a great deal of farfing around with envelopes I finally got the model to display properly in the editor with the idle animation running as it should. When I test level however the darn exploding verts issue comes back, it sometimes displays properly then goes to Hell again resulting in hair pulling and gnashing of teeth.



Do character animations really need to be shader driven?



This is causing me to believe only a select few (one) are even going to be close to being capable of creating custom characters for Reloaded and only biped soldiers and zombies are ever going to be available. If it's a big secret on creating anything other than these I would love to be in on it



I don't see this being an attractive software for character modelers if they are made to jump through hoops to simply get something that's not stock rigged into it or limited by shader driven bone limits. Not all games characters are created using the Max biped and its hard enough for me to create characters without struggling to get it to display in the game engine..

I must say i have to agree.


Please make it simpler to import other artists characters,or our own (please ).

Dave

i did see somewhere someone had an idle animated girrafe in the engine that seemed to look ok, don't quote me but it may have been TattieBojangle i thinks that the right name spelling anyway , i will try and find the video he had with it

Totally agree!

I for one tried the blender to fpscr way just to realize that it just doesnt work for characters, at least not yet and 3D Max is no solution.
Anyways from the looks at least i can get the soldier skeleton into milkshape3d along with hud weapons. It is a backdraw but at least i can get my characters/weapon models ingame. However @TGC you could have made it easier for us, the way it is now ppl will depend on the official models and thats not good, k it is good for TGC sales but not for thirdparty devs.

i found the video and it was TattieBojangle not sure how much further he got with this though

I have re timed all animations to suit the stock character animation frames then re-mixed these down in an attempt at using the default hard coded animation calls in Reloaded. I have exported using Panda and KwExporter and I have exported from Fragmotion with nothing having completely satisfactory results with bone weighting.

There are 6040 frames of animation and 56 bones in the rig (after decimating my rig), I could create a single 250 frame idle animation and let the engine run it without any scripting and pretty sure it would work fine but trying to do anything more than that isn't working for me



I have had varied results throughout this experience with it sometimes displaying badly and animating fine and one issue solved seems to create another, if the animation and display is fine then it falls apart when the character moves away from the spot it was dropped into, sometimes it displays in editor then goes to heck then works again...the frustration is simply not worth it.



I remember I did have these characters running as is in the first beta, albeit the animations were wrong for it and thought now would be a good time to reanimate and see how it went.

Thats why i moved back to the good old ms3d, it stinks but at the end the result matters.

I'll sleep on it and try again tomorrow, that sometimes works

Characters have always been a problem for users FPSC in particular for the reason that they are just to hard for most users to make for reasons we all know about.

This also goes for any kind of dynamic entity - its all overly complicated or requires users to have access to resources of a Rocket scientist - either financial or in their skill sets and so on. Everything much too complicated and difficult for the majority of would be users.

A reason there has never been enough of such things from either media makers or users themselves like Characters, animals, quadrupeds, single backbone animals. Either organic or non organic dynamic object entities like machines, vehicles, flying objects and so on all things that are not easy to do and get into any engine even at the very basic level for anyone other than a specialist.

Yes its a hard skills all round but it can be easier or harder and easier is better.

We all know the main issue - max and nothing else and the engine itself being designed to be happiest with its use for those who have access to it and understand how to use the pipeline and no one else.

Not saying it cant be done otherwise but clearly without being a rocket scientist its easy enough to understand its a permanent headache for the vast majority.

As things like Characters have always been difficult and now even more so in Reloaded its the domain of a limited few on who most will be reliant exclusively for content creation.

Not sure why also we cant have simple vertex animation use for simple object entities which would always boost the number of animated objects users would look to add to their worlds and make a big difference in some games at least where they are appropriate.

Weapons too are a complex job as we know - cant even get a cross hair out of Reloaded for any Zoom weapon at the moment being hard coded leave alone an animation - how difficult can TGC make it for users?

Someone mentioned billboards recently that animate to face the player (or not) - Yes I know they may be old hat and are basically engine animated and not user end specifically but still an item that may for some help for various purposes in certain circumstances. So many things that are excluded at least at the moment that could or may be helpful and give actual end users options and choices.

As to Characters yes it would be good if users could use their own creations much more easily based on a basic biped/bones model that could be given out that they could work with in something other than max and successfully attach their own animation sets in a reasonably easy manner given its a complex subject.

A character creator mention but I don't believe that would allow such things - but only allow tinkering with existing supplied models to change minor appearance. Not really a Character creator but might be helpful of course as its an additional tool option I doubt you will be able to create (model) your own Characters as such inside it?

I want to add a quadruped to my games too or maybe 6 - 8 legs. Cant see me getting there somehow do you.

I don't really know what I am talking about - and the complexities and reasons so just supporting model and media makers and users alike in anything that will help them make more diverse and hopefully better games by making things easier in any way possible.

I guess TGC will do what they can to help I am sure when they get more time and can look at these different things hopefully.

Something like the Spore Character Creator would be great.

While I totally agree with the above statements did we get some type of word that they are done with character creation? Or did they say that this was how it was going to work? I am just asking because the way it is being discussed as if they planned on keeping it this way? If so I am worried as well, but I was under the influence we haven't even gotten there yet.

A answer from the team on this would be good.How about it boys .

Dave

Here are some of my personal notes on creating/exporting characters for Reloaded:





1. Yes the hard-coded limit for bones is 60. There is a caveat though: the limit is 60 bones per draw call. Translated to 3ds Max, this means that the limit is 60 bones per skin modifier. If you can logically break up your character into parts and skin them separately, such as skinning the body separately from the head or other parts like armor, etc, then you can have more than 60 bones per character.



2. Last I checked, the shader also has a limit of 3 bones per vertex, to keeps things fast. If you're weighting vertices to more than 3 bones, then this could be a cause for exploding vertices in Reloaded. I've found 3 bones per vertex to be plenty for good deformation. So you'll want to limit the Skin modifier to 3 bones per vertex in the "Advanced Parameters" rollout. It's also a good idea to use the "Remove Zero Weights" button with a low tolerance (like 0.01) just to clean up any superficial vertex weighting prior to export.







If you absolutely MUST have more than 3 bones per vertex, then you can modify the shader to reflect this. Let me know and I can show the changes to make in the shader.



That's all I can think of for now. And if you're using the Reloaded animation set for your characters, 3ds Max users should ABSOLUTELY use the kW Xporter located in my sig, to keep file size small.

Way out of my price range ,It would be nice if we had a importer built in.Nearly every game engine i have come across
has the same problem,you can import static objects.But when it comes to animated characters you have to rely on people with expensive
software.

Dave

Hi guys the video you see above is as far as i got then gave up like rolfy i got very frustrated to say the least and gave up as it was taking
to much time but i totally agree with this thread we need to be able to simply put our own characters in.

Or hire someone to write a proper directx exporter for blender. However all ways lead to rome and therefore no max3d is not the only way but the easiest one. Anyways milkshape3d can do the job as well and Blender 2.49 too.

It is only about investing the headache time to understand what works and ofc bond1s explanation is actually the last brick that we needed to understand why some things just dont work.

OP, check out makehuman. Personally, I think the FPSCR team should buddy up with software like that.

Thanks bond1 for the info



I have used Max since v.2 and for a lot more than just modeling,I had completely forgotten about 'remove zero weights' but was unaware of the limit on 3 bones per vertex shader requirement.

I usually go through a model and manually remove nearby bone influence but was getting tired of the back and forth and simply doing this in a minimal way so might be the answer when you have wings waving around and influencing nearby verts.

Doesn't Fragmotion weight 4 bones per vertex by default?

I am also unsure that kW Xporter will export more than one modifier stack level, Panda certainly wont so how would you break a model into parts?



I will look at this and see if it improves things



Uman, vertex animation is possible (the stock gates are vertex driven), it was possible in Classic too but required some guess work on frame timings and tends to be hard on CPU.



I do sympathise with non Max users when it comes to the animation rig available (might comfort you to know I don't use this rig myself I prefer to create my own), but pretty sure you can limit bone assignments in other packages as well, if it's the missing piece then fine

It's not about expensive software but knowing what's required, Max .x export is no better than any other and usually written by third party so the software itself makes no difference when modeling characters



Makehuman won't help with this,creating character models is turning out to be the easy part, it's export/import and shader limits that's the major problem here.

I'm not sure about Fragmotion, it's possible that it uses a max of 4 bones per vertex. The 3 bones per vertex limit is purely an arbitrary limit set in Reloaded's character shader. It speeds things up since it only has to loop through each vertex 3 times instead of 4. If you have particularly complex character that HAS to have 4 bone assignments per vertex, then open the character shader in notepad and search for all instances of this line:



for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++)



and change it to this:



for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++)





For breaking up a model - I mean have the head, armor, or whatever as a separate detached mesh, with it's own Skin modifier. Now this is not always gonna be ideal depending on the type of character (it wouldn't make sense on a naked man, lol). But if the head and neck are going to be stuffed down a shirt anyway, then it can be it's own separate mesh with it's own Skin modifier. Same goes for hands and feet connected to sleeves and pants, and any type of rigid armor/accessories/hats/whatever. Those type of things can be a separate mesh with it's own skin modifier.

I agree as well. I've been trying to get things working for alternate characters from 3rd party sources and even FPSCR classic. The orc model from the fantasy pack works great so far, but others have failed from that same pack. The imp, for example, looks great in Animer, but then causes one wing to be out of whack and the chest area to have vertices all warped. I sent a PM to the Animer guy here on the forums several days ago and no response.

I tried a great wolf model from Arteria3d and it also works great in Animer, but then is all warped when animating in reloaded. I haven't gotten a single 3rd party model to look right in reloaded yet and just limited success with classic characters.

My opinion is that the engine should support .x animated files period. No ifs ands or buts. No disclaimers or gotchas. I'm learning DX9 shader code now so I can see if I can figure out how to fix some of these issues as well as make custom entity shaders.

Breaking up a model like this would be fine if it can be exported separately and attached to your main character model in Reloaded, no idea how you plan to do this, I guess this how you intend to do things for the Character Creator.

This is one way but i believe we should not need to do this :/ would be good to know where TGC stand on this and what they are going to do to allow us to us our own .x characters.

Even better, in my opinion, would be to allow import and animation of fbx characters. I know one of the features voted on was alternate import possibilities for external content. I'm hoping that happens at some point.

Fbx can be worse than .x when it comes to issues with animation export even across the same package you created it in



I am not whining here about the difficulty in creating characters rather the difficulty caused by my lack of knowledge or simple mindedness caused by deteriorating grey matter as I get older. If as bond1 suggests it may be possible to break models down with their own skin modifier it opens up a whole host of possibilities for Reloaded, more than just characters could use this to create some nifty models



As I say all the same it should be easier to get characters into Reloaded and other formats are only going to be useful for static models really, perhaps a simplified shader for those less complex characters might be in order. Sometimes in Classic I found it easier to turn shaders off completely, don't want that with Reloaded but for the less shader savvy among us it might help if a simpler character shader was used.

All formats have their issues, and I'm not expert on fbx or x for that matter, but in all my years of messing around with 3D content, I have never had more trouble porting content from one app to another than with .x files. I've use fbx only fairly recently and have seen it work across programs much better.



However, I'm not so much advocating it has to be fbx, but rather a format that is readily available in the industry and with import options in reloaded that actually work without issues. Fbx just happens to be very popular and there is a lot of content available.

Unfortunately FBX is now an Autodesk proprietary format. There would be legal issues even trying to make an importer for it. The older versions of fbx import/export (when it was owned by Alias) is not compatible with newer versions now owned (and under lock and key) by Autodesk. It would be nightmarish trying to support all versions of that format.



I really don't know of any other good,open format, that standardizes skinned, animated models in a unified way. It really does look like .X is the best format. And it boils down to the quality of the exporter, not all are equal. Some do not actually spit out 100% directx compliant models - they may look fine in some software like Fragmotion but crash the official model viewer included in the Directx SDK.

Exactly, and this is why it's a problem. The format is complicated and I don't think I've ever seen good compatibility across programs ever. I even just tried PolyTrans, a $450 program that claims to have the best importer/exporters out there and it totally couldn't handle the TGC Dark Matter .x files. They sort of came in, but were very messed up.

Maybe for you and other talented 3D artists but for most of us, we look at Makehuman, or Poser characters and think I could never make a better model myself than these lol or even close. Trouble is they are a bit high poly and normally have little in the way of in the clothes dept Well Poser has more but again, way too high poly. The walk animation tool was cracking though in the last version I used, quite some time ago now though. You could get some really good walk and run anims really easy. Used to use it to get Flashback style sprites. A system like that in the Character maker would be good, but I imagine it would be more for the look of a character rather than anims, could be wrong though.
The main issue I have always had with relying on other peoples characters, is the lack of basic anims or anims you need specifically for your game. This was in DB rather than FPSC, but I used FPSC models from the store for DB at the time. Say getting someone to point in a direction, or pick something up and examine it, sitting down eating etc. There's always something you could do with having that there's just no suitable animation for. Most files don't have a model you can try to add it yourself, so you are stuck or have to use a bad substitute anim. Having the ability to animate in Reloaded would be a big plus for this sort of thing. I'd certainly welcome it. Character models on the store (when there are any) would be a whole lot more useful, if you didn't have to rely on the anims included alone, but could add to them in Reloaded afterwards.
May be awhile off if ever, but most game engines these days allow you to animate from within the editor so I imagine they may look at it at some point. We can hope.

It's the pain of the indie developer, and there's no easy fix. Probably why almost all studios write their own exporters tailored to the ONE modeling software they use in-house. And they almost always have super-strict bone naming conventions for characters, weapons, etc.



It would be a huge (impossible?) task to try and support any one particular format, that includes exporters custom made across a wide range of modeling software, and also supports all the existing models floating out there that some dude made 10 years ago.



And don't forget about bugs in the modeling software itself! There was a bug in 3ds Max several versions back that did not export skinned editable poly meshes correctly! Only editable meshes. This was not a fault of the exporter, but rather a bug in one of the libraries in the 3ds Max SDK. So there is yet another layer of complexity involved.

Just waking up so forgot to mention this info, Max by default places nubs on the ends of bones these helpers are being counted as bones themselves, the only way to avoid these is to uncheck 'export hidden' and don't hide the rig itself, this wont appear in game anyhow so no need to hide it.



Thing is nubs are hidden by default so I didn't notice/forgot them at first and couldn't figure why my bone count was so high. I have also found KW Xporter isn't auto setting frame count (pretty sure it did first time I used it).



Perhaps they could implement a simple keyframe animation tool for the character creator when it goes into development to add these simple animations on a standard Reloaded rig

Yes, you're right about the nubs. If you can avoid them that's good. Sometimes you can't if it's a custom rig as they are needed for IK. If I can get away using dummies or point helpers I use those instead to attach to a biped or CAT rig.

Another thing about the kW Xporter - it is best to make sure your entire animation sequence is visible in the trackbar on export. For example don't try and export an animation sequence from 0-100 while you only have frames 25-50 visible in the trackbar.

One other note about bones/nubs: If a bone or nub is only used to DRIVE an animation, but is not needed to be directly skinned to the model itself (things like look-at controllers, IK nubs, etc), make sure you don't have it listed in the Skin modifier bone list, and it won't count toward your bone limit. You probably already know this, but I find myself accidentally making this mistake with the biped COM root at times.

Character creator, character importing ability SOMETHING. Im sick of the 2 mentally challenged characters already. They still run away from me at times and yet still shooting me! Trick shot punks Id say. OR, they shoot where many talk from!



Fot the best User experience across the board, Id say the character creator needs to come first!

If I export from Max I get a warped model which appears to have serious envelope issues, none of which show in Max (if I cant see the issue in the modeler I have no way to fix it), if I import this model into Fragmotion and export again it appears correctly for a few seconds and then explodes and fixes itself then explodes again. Reckon this can wait for another time.



None of the above fixes did anything to help

At the moment I am having difficulty in even getting vertex animated doors to work.

I made quite a few for use in Classic - now some work in Reloaded and some wont. Strangely some doors are composed of two halves left and right and so I use two separate doors. Work OK in Classic - In Reloaded - right hand door works - left hand door does not. Very strange for basic stuff or what you think should be.

A big subject this one, and as you may know we are working 'in a focused way' on AI and performance. Full support for custom character importing is not on our hot list for the next few weeks. If someone has a custom character and having difficulties bringing it into Reloaded, send it direct to me at lee@thegamecreators.com and I will see if I can pass it to someone who can help. The process is not 'impossible' but I agree it needs a LOT of information revealing to get you to w[h]ere you need to be. Any advice we create from this will also be placed in the artist seller web page for the benefit of future artists.

rolfy: Just curious - does the model work ok in FPSC classic? How about the official directx model viewer from the SDK? I've attached the viewer so you don't have to install the entire DX SDK.

not sure about you guys but My characters work perfect using model viewer from the SDK so it just frustrates me more lol

It displays fine in DX model viewer, no idea about FPSC right now though this is one of the Demon models I sold through an official model pack so it worked fine in the past. I am simply trying to change the animations is all, though not sure I am using the same export settings this time around.

Mine too. Even the old Dark Matter 2 models I've been trying to get to work. Microsoft obviously knows their file format very well indeed.

I now have the exploding verts issue under control, used 0.05 setting for 'remove zero weights' but still have to export /import through Fragmotion to prevent the warped mesh envelopes



Still its a lot better than it was. I know I said I was giving up for now but hate to be beaten by this



Edit* Spoke too soon its back again just appears later in the animation frames now is all

Good for you. At least you have some control over the whole process. I'm just taking 3rd party and old classic models and trying to get them to work. Not much I can do there aside from Mender/Animer. Although the Animer developer finally got a hold of me and he's willing to look at some of these models and see what can be done to fix them with Mender/Animer. He said he's been trying to get the classic alternate type models to work as well.

I know what you mean. I can't let stuff like this go either when I have problem with a model.



The .05 threshold setting for 'remove zero weights' is telling, as well as importing/exporting from Fragmotion. I have a hunch that Fragmotion may be culling some additional stray vertex weights that are sneaking into your export, and therefore "fixing" your model.



One last thing to try would be to open the Weight Table graph (also in the Skin modifier). It's big, but will show you the actual weights for every single vertex on your model.



Things to look for:



*make sure there are no vertices with no bones assignments at all (unweighted)

*make sure there aren't any verts with more than 3 bone assignments - maybe there are still some in there that JUST beat your threshold of .05, and are weighted at .051 or something like that.

I think I may try rebuilding the rig from scratch, I used extras to create this one, maybe a separate bone rig attached to the biped using a dummy may work....maybe not.

Re-rigged and tweaked the little devils.







Got 'em to follow the player around and fly/land randomly, reckon if I can get a copy of the animframes list for the Zombies (providing they are using same hard coded method of soldier AI) I could use the slash/bite melee system. If not then pretty sure I could get scripting to do it.



Once we get flack in I can set 'em up for throwing fireballs again



But very happy with the first flying characters in Reloaded so far

rolfy, I can't seem to find these in the store, they must have obviously sold out.

Oh! I reckon they migrated to Reloaded, home from home...lol.

The first on display at least. Nice work. Hey, did you know if you set ischaracter=1 then you can blast them and they'll die?

Feel free to post them up if you got any.



They are characters, already have slash,bite melee, random die anims, run, walk etc,crouch to stand, eat and all that happy stuff

Gotcha. Cool. Looks like I won't be the only one with alternate characters doing things in the contest. It's on like Donkey Kong.