Frostbite animations research (Battlefield series, Battlefront, Mirror's edge, etc...)

Garry's Mod modelling
#1

I have started frostbite animations research. Almost all their games are using the same ANT animation engine. After a week of work I can export most of the animations, and it worked equally fine in an oldest game I could find (Medal of Honor Warfighter) and the one of recent games (SWBF).

Here is a test output of 40 random StarWars Battlefront animations (out of 2200) in one raw from arctic_03.AssetBank

There is still a lot of work to do to make a tool, so it would be interesting to know which game animations would be most interesting for the community:

  • Battlefield 1
  • Battlefield 3/4/Hardline
  • Star Wars Battlefront 1
  • Star Wars Battlefront 2
  • Mirror’s Edge Catalyst
  • other
#2

Nice !, can you make a downloadable archive of all this annimation in “MEGA”

#3

you mean these 40? or all 2200 ?

#4

if you can extract them all why not ( if you have time ) :downs:
or make a folder and add file by file (name it with its specific animation), i mean, open folder where you can update with new animation extracted.
*Folder name (annimation):
-anim 01
-anim 02
-anim 03
.
.
.
.
-anim x

#5

Technically, the test tool runs automatically, it will not take long to extract all 2200. But there are a number of problems:

  • each animation is made to work with certain skeleton, and I currently have no way to detect it (applying them all to human skeleton)
  • 2200 is the number of only one type of animations, in only one file (i don’t have the game)
  • this will result in 2200 small SMD files, or one big file with them all in sequence, over 500 MB in size
  • not all animations currently work correct, some of them will be weirdly distorted (about 5-10%)
#6

I suppose Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Adnromeda will - potentially - work too? From what i saw BioWare used ANT too in their Frostbite games too.

#7

Potentially yes. But I didn’t check that yet.

#8

This is awesome and all but why did you choose SMD as the exported format and not FBX it’s just so much easier and flexible, SMD imports everything as all 1 mesh depending on the importer you use.

#9

Well I can’t speak for id-daemon’s choice, but I know that FBX is a notoriously obtuse format to write to properly. Compare to SMD, which is a drop-dead simple format.

#10

SMD merges everything together, but also welds all vertices together, so when selecting elements you can much easily separate chunks of the model without having to select each face manually.

#11

Amazing work once again daemon.

#12

I choose SMD because its simple, universal, high-compatible format, and it’s solid as a rock. For some weird reason people think that it only supports 3 weights, but it’s wrong. The number of SMD vertex weights is unlimited. Yes, it has some other limits and problems, but nothing is perfect in this world. And as far as i know, SMD is not importing everything as 1 mesh. You can define submeshes in SMD.

FBX, on the contrary, is low compatible, unnecessary complicated, and all-the-time changing format. It’s a nightmare to import, export or exchange anything in FBX. If I chose FBX, I would have to update its SDK all the time, and deal with all kinds of compatibility problems with different editors and exporters. In other words, I would stuck forever in support for such tool.

#13

Who the hell thinks SMD only supports 3 weights?

#14

A year ago, when I started my first tool with bones, a couple of people told me that:

#15

What the fuck.

#16

Created a list of animations of this type: https://pastebin.com/cjVaBD5b

Good idea may be export them in groups. For example, these are most of Luke specific animations:

#17

I guess i could use a script like Wall Worm for a later version of max since it allows me to split the meshes on import,do you happen to know when you might release this i’d really like to get my hands on the E-11 and A280 animations as the ones i recorded with cinematic tools is really buggy.

#18

No I don’t know. But to speed up the process you can send me both original and converted files of said models, because I don’t have the game. I can make tests, and maybe you can use your existing models and just apply SMD animations to it. This way you wont need Wall Worm. Also, which animations were buggy, so I can check these specifically.

#19

Well not sure what you need because you already have the Leia model and she supports the humanmale bone set and you can just load the E-11 and A280 third person animations onto that.

When i say buggy it’s a normal problem with the Cinematic Capture tools they screw up a few frames here and there when recording animations ingame and it saving them as FBX.

#20

I was thinking that if weapon models in SWBF are “distorted” the same way as in BF1, they may not work with animations I’m extracting now. Anyway, you can check it yourself (pm sent). At least without weapon it looks ok: