Custom Animator for Playermodels (Halo Reach Grunt)

[MrPinhead71]

Hello to whoever may come to read this. My name is MrPinhead71 but I can be called Brenden. I created an account on Facepunch for the purpose of finding help for my project but I may use it for other needs in the future. Anyway enough of that, what I'm making this thread for is to find someone with more knowledge than me about animating. Obviously I'm not here to request someone completely do my work for me or create my ideas, I want to do it myself but I'm a little lost. I guess this could be better suited for the help icon, but I was wondering if someone would like to collaborate on this. Let me bring you up to speed on what I have done and what I know...

So my story starts like any other. I grew interested in making my own models and soon gained the software necessary. I am getting more familiar with 3DS Max as I think its preferred by most, but I don't really know. The model I found as you read in the title is a Grunt from the popular Halo series. So now what I've come to discover is that most models follow a standard skeleton, the valve biped, meaning all animations are linked to this skeleton. Now my problem is a grunt is a little different from your average Joe in that he's shorter, has legs shorter than arms and wide shoulders. This poses a problem to rigging the valve skeleton to the model. It isn't possible and I feel stupid for even trying. Now as I said above, the Valve Biped uses all the same animation .mdls for every player model with that skeleton. The .mdls are m_anm.mdl, m_gst.mdl, m_pst.mdl, m_shd.mdl and m_ss.mdl as far as I know and I don't know which of these are necessary (Random gestures aren't needed for every model). So what I thought I'd do was decompile each mdl and start recreating the .smd's on my models skeleton. Little did I know there are hundreds and this isn't really the problem because I'm willing to do each animation. What I found is that if you open say Walk_N.smd in 3ds and save the animation, it can be loaded on my skeleton, but the bones need to be named exact and importantly NEED TO BE IN THE PROPER STARTING FRAME. So before I add the animation I have to have the basic pose set up. Now the problem is not all the .smds have animations, some are saved as still references that have keyframes for no reason. I did find a model on the internet (Spyro) that doesn't use the valve biped yet still has good animations, but this model doesn't have to hold weapons and doesn't have different view models. So my request is some knowledge on where to go from here or someone to help me on this. If your still reading I thank you. If you need to contact me, the best would be through here or Steam: MrPinhead71. I will keep checking for updates.

Thanks lots!

[Senscith]

Bones in the animation need to match up with the rig, in name and orientation. If they're orientated differently the animation will put them in the "proper" orientation making your model look like an absolute mess. [URL="http://wiki.garrysmod.com/page/Player_animations"]Check out this link here for a bit of background on how to set up custom animations for Gmod.[/URL] In a nutshell you can create your own animations, then compile them under the proper ACT_. When the game goes to tell the model to do the walking animation, it'll see act_walk and use the custom animation on the custom skeleton instead of the Valve Biped.

I suppose if you wanted a easier way to do it, for grunts, would be to make it as large as a normal person, rig it to the Valve Biped then use lua to scale the model back down.

[MrPinhead71]

[QUOTE=Senscith;46069663]Bones in the animation need to match up with the rig, in name and orientation. If they're orientated differently the animation will put them in the "proper" orientation making your model look like an absolute mess. [URL="http://wiki.garrysmod.com/page/Player_animations"]Check out this link here for a bit of background on how to set up custom animations for Gmod.[/URL] In a nutshell you can create your own animations, then compile them under the proper ACT_. When the game goes to tell the model to do the walking animation, it'll see act_walk and use the custom animation on the custom skeleton instead of the Valve Biped.

I suppose if you wanted a easier way to do it, for grunts, would be to make it as large as a normal person, rig it to the Valve Biped then use lua to scale the model back down.[/QUOTE]

Thanks, I kinda found this but this is good to know someone can confirm. I don't have a lot of time to work on it but I'll try this when I do. I did think about the lua route, but as I said the grunt has much to weird physical features for a standard skeleton. Thanks again

[MrPinhead71]

I did a few tests, but ended up failing. I tried applying my saved Valve animations to my models skeleton and it looks fine when played in 3ds Max but when I look at the sequences in HLMV the arms and legs move in strange ways, like the movement is there, just random parts move this way and that. What I want to do is just add the Valve animations onto my skeleton and then save them as smd's. I think I know what to do after that, I just need the proper animation smd's.. which I'm starting to think isn't possible so I might just be scrapping this project...

[cra0kalo]

motionmapper.exe
[url]https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Skeleton_motion_mapping[/url]

Though your skeleton should reside a similar amount of bones and hierarchy or else it will fail. I have plans to test a workflow I've been considering which *should* work however recreating the poseparameters was hell enough

[MrPinhead71]

[QUOTE=cra0kalo;46079955]motionmapper.exe
[url]https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Skeleton_motion_mapping[/url]

Though your skeleton should reside a similar amount of bones and hierarchy or else it will fail. I have plans to test a workflow I've been considering which *should* work however recreating the poseparameters was hell enough[/QUOTE]

Finally a step in the right direction :) Can't believe I didn't find something on this. Now I'm new to this but it says it has to have the same hierarchy, so I added the bones to my model, even if they are unnecessary. Just for testing purposes I left these in weird places and copied the weights of my old model onto the new skeleton with the new bones, so the new bones have know weights. Basically my models exactly the same with the new useless bones. Moving on, got motionmapper open and used their command, changing the directories to my own target, source and outcome smds. Now when I run the command I get "ERROR: could not load file 'H'". Thanks

*UPDATE*

Before I go to bed, I'll add this. I managed to get an outcome smd. I mean it's progress but nothing good. The error I was getting earlier was from a bad source animation so I found one out of the sdk contents instead. Now when I run motionmapper, I get the error on each frame: "Constraint parent has broken the plane, this frame's plane constraint unsolvable!" and when I import this into max, well, you don't wanna know..