Head Jigglebone Help

Garry's Mod modelling
#1

So here’s my question, when you add a skeletal structure branched from the default head1 bone and add jigglebone (for example, simulated hair physics) it looks really good on playermodels, ragdolls, and to an extent, NPC’s. However, I noticed an issue where if the NPC has controllers to turn the head, to allow for head tracking, the vertices bound to the extended head1 family will remain in place. By this I mean, the vertices stay wherever the currently playing animation is telling them to be, rather than following the turning head.

They move for every other rule, including physics, animation, and animation blending. They also seem to work for multiplayer models. For example, in Synergy, my player model turns it’s head to track other players and it looks fine. Only the NPC’s have this issue.

If anyone has run into this issue before and knows anyway of fixing it, I’d love to hear it.

#2

I haven’t had this issue myself. And I’ve made NPC’s with jiggleboned features branching from the head (with head tracking) multiple times before. As long as the bones that will be jiggling are parented to the head. There shouldn’t be a problem.

You may be able to fix it by remaking the tracking controllers yourself. They’re basically just animations of the bind pose with the head turned to the right, left, up, and down, and the game blends between them for tracking. And as long as the new animations are named correctly the model’s original .QC should handle the rest.

It’s cool how it is set up. The way head tracking words you could theoretically make anything move depending on the look angle. Like by flipping the tracks you could easily make a model that never looks at you. Or you could possibly turn someones entire body to look at you or make someone punch himself in the face every time he looks up.

Theirs really no limitations. Same goes for move_yaw. You can take any animation and blend between multiple different animations depending on move direction. But now I’m simply getting off topic.

#3

Yeah, I looked at the Zero-Suit Samus model as a reference, and it doesn’t have a problem with that. However, what I just realized, is that I accidentally parented the hair joints to the Forward joint, which is parented to the Head1.

So even though that’s my mistake, I don’t see why that would effect the rest of the bone tree as the parent of all of them is Head1 :confused:

I’m also wondering if the fact that I am using CharacterFX to add new joints to models without messing up the skeleton is throwing something out of whack.

EDIT: Found the problem, upon closer inspection, the head rotate blends that Valve made for some reason have the forward joint keyframed at the same position, thus causing my problem. Yay. Thanks Flux, I probably wouldn’t have checked for that if you hadn’t mentioned it.

#4

OK cool. Yeah the forward joint on valve’s models is useless. You don’t need a forward bone for head tracking. Just a forward attachment point. I guess valve did it to have an easy place holder.

#5

I swear, Valve’s laziness will be the death of me some day… It’s so hard trying to reverse engineer your way through the SDK, and constantly hitting dead-ends because everything is slopped together with shortcuts.

:frowning:

Oh well, the battle is won for today at least