52 réponses à ce sujet

[cyberglum]

Hi all,

Just something I wanted to share, if people are interested then I can package them up and post them on the vault.

I needed to get the skies populated in the module I have been developing for far too long now and after watching OTR's very easy to follow tutorial on placeable animations I got to work!

www.youtube.com/watch

Obviously the video is quite short but you get the general idea.

Modifié par cyberglum, 14 mars 2011 - 09:01 .

[Frith5]

Incredible! Sure, post 'em! Post 'em!

[OldTimeRadio]

Looks good!  Great use of the effect, it really livens things up.  People can download and view the tutorial from here.

[henesua]

Wow... that is amazing.

[Karvon]

Indeed, great stuff!

[Wall3T]

that was great stuff! i was thinking about doing something just like it myeslf for the d20 modern (thought maybe some flying planes, helicopters, sci fi ships, etc) but it seems you already did it and an awesome job too :3

makes me want to do make more of my airships so i can populate my own skies...

[cyberglum]

Heh, glad you guys enjoy them. Big thanks to Old Time Radio for the tutorial initially then a helpful nudge in the right direction. I've packed them into a hak, There are 8 for now, along with a set of sounds for atmosphere. Once they're approved and up I'll let you guys know an' link.

I plan to get a little more adventurous with it, after playing around with OTR's Land and Take Off demo. ships landing and taking off through triggers, simple stuff, but effective. I'm only just beginning to learn the whole 3dmax/nwnmax thing but its satisfying to finally bring something to the community.

'Glum

[cyberglum]

You can now download these from the vault:

nwvault.ign.com/View.php

Enjoy!

'Glum

[OldTimeRadio]

Great work!  I just checked out the test module and it's perfect, right down to the height off the ground that they are.  So when you're zoomed out they still fly between the player and the camera- it's a great effect and it makes the place seem so much more alive.  Only thing I would really want is some basic driver models behind the wheel.

More! 

[Frith5]

This stuff is great. I'm currently trying to figure out where I deviated from the tutorial. My placeables fly along perfectly in the Toolset, but in game they aren't animated. I need to go back and see where I messed up. I'm confused because it works in the Toolset.
Thanks for this stuff!

-JFK

[cyberglum]

Frith5,

I may be being too obvious, but make sure the Animate Box is ticked on the first tab of the placeables properties.

I just did a few more of these, the BSG Viper circling, a Y-Wing back and forth, and a Slave 1. The Slave 1 looks pretty cool, but I'm going to redo it its flight pattern, little short right now.

One thing I'm having a problem with, I dunno if anyone has any advice, and excuse my laymans terms, but one thing eludes me in putting these together.

Once I import a model into gmax, delete out the bumph I don't need and am left with the model itself I convert it to an editable mesh, all good...

Following the tutorial (and I understand why its done in it) I then ATTACH all the parts of the model to a single part of itself and get a single model to then go onto the next part of the process.

When performing the ATTACH process, you're given options to do with maintaining the materials. I assume this relates to the bitmaps which will be displayed on each part of the model. When ATTACHing a model which uses a numbr of different bitmaps I can't for the life of me work out how to maintain the correct bitmaps for the correct parts of the model.

I suspect I have completely the wrong end of the stick - or there is a possible workaround, not sure. I've been using the power of the interweb to try and figure it out but to no avail.

Its not a problem, I have plenty to be working with for the time being.For now I'm just going to stick to simple flight patterns, with multipule flight patterns for the same model.Not too many, maybe 2-3, just wanted to avoid the problem of seeing the SAME model doing the SAME flight pattern again if people were to use them in modules/PW's.

'Glum

[Frith5]

Hah, I feel like a dunderhead. Maybe too much wine with my boiled dinner tonight? That was the problem.

[OldTimeRadio]

Cyberglum, if you substitute a Dummy node for the mesh in my tutorial, you'll wind up with something you can use again and again and which you can link your any number of meshes to in order to avoid "attaching" the geometry together.  NWN cannot understand multi-material meshes (meshes to which more than one bitmap is applied) and so you can get around this by attaching all the separate meshes to the Dummy node which has already had the animations baked on.  In this way, when the Dummy node moves around so will the meshes which are attached to it.  They (the component meshes which make up a space ship, for instance) should keep their relative position to each other as they move around.

1. One doesn't need to worry about combining meshes, generally.  And certainly not when they have different bitmaps.  I did it in the demo but it really wasn't necessary.  I probably should have done the demo using a Dummy node, anyway.

2. Select and link icon, which is used to link the meshes to the Dummy node after the animation is baked onto it is the icon with two boxes chained together, two icons to the right of the Select arrow icon up top in GMax

3 You can find where to create Dummy nodes by looking on the Create tab
-> Helpers -> Dummy (it's under the Object Type rollout).  It
doesn't matter what size you make it, best to keep it small-ish but it
doesn't matter as it will be invisible.  If it does show up in game, you can always apply an Aurora Trimesh modifier to it and just uncheck render.

4. Once you have the Dummy node set up with baked animations on it, save it off in GMax.  You can then reuse the same Dummy node setup again and again with different meshes.  All you'll have to do is import the meshes, position them where the Dummy node is (with the animation slider at frame 0), Select and Link them to the Dummy node and (as long as you follow the steps to get the Aurora base created and set with the appropriate "default" animation, etc.) you'll be good to go.

Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 18 mars 2011 - 01:17 .

[OldTimeRadio]

Chrysoli,

I think you're on the right track.  If you follow my tutorial, you will reach a point after you have changed the Position controller of your mesh or dummy node to Path Constraint and  where you click on the Add Path button and then select your spline.  At that moment your mesh/nodes will snap to the spline and if you scrub the animation track you will see it moving along the spline as you move the slider back and forth.

Once you're at that point, take a look just below the anim slider, making sure your spline-constrained mesh is still selected.  You'll see little tick marks which indicate which frame you're at.  So if the slider is over the number 50, you're looking at frame 50 of the animation.  You will also notice 2 little boxes on those tick marks, sometimes solid colors and sometimes multi-colored but in your case they'll probably be maroon and there will be one at frame 0 and one at whaever your ending frame is, probably 60.  Those are animation keyframes.  Different colors mean different types of keyframes.  One color means a position keyframe, another mean Rotation keyframe, etc.  Multi-colored keyframs identify themselves as having several types of keyframed animation in that frame.  You can always right-click on a keyframe and go up to Delete Keys which will show you a list of what keys are actually stored in that keyframe.  If you're clueless about what a keyframe is, I have a quick rundown in the next paragrpaph.  If you click on the end keyframe (the little box on the right side of the animation timeline, probably sitting right on frame 60), it will turn white meaning it's selected.  Then you can drag and move that ending/last keyframe around.  Say to frame 20.  If you click off the keyframe onto the animation times (i.e. the little tick marks), it will go back to being maroon again.  Now scrub the slider back and forth and you'll see that the mesh/node you have constraint to the spline path will cover the distance in whatever number of frames are between the first keyframe (at 0) and the ending keyframe, which you've now moved to 20.  If you are able to see that effect, select and drag the ending keyframe out to 100 or whereever.  You should see that the mesh/node which you've set to follow the spline path will now take 100 frames to move from the beginning of the spline to the end of it.  Some animation lengths are hard-coded to be a certain number of frames.  But not default animations and not placeable off/off2on/on/on2off animations.  So you can have a ball with those.  That should be your solution.  I don't think I've ever had a problem with Bake Anims not being able to handle frames over 60.  If it is insisting on the end frame being 60 after you've extended your number of animation frames, close it and open it again.  It snarfs up whatever the length of your animatin timeline is and fills in the field appropriately.  On the off chance you're missing something about changing the length of your animation timeline, it's done by clicking on the Time Configuration icon, which is two to the left of the hand icon in the lower right corner of GMax's screen.  Looks like a little clock and calendar thing.  Once that dialog is up just go to the spot marked Animation and change the Length from 60 to 100 (or whatever).  If you Tab off the field, End Time and Frame Count should automatically update to reflect your new value and, of course, after you click OK on that dialog the animation timeline should similarly show the full frame range.

Keyframes: 3DS Max and thus NWN (because the Aurora engine really seems to be a creature of 3DS Max in many ways) use a process called "tweening", where you don't have to tell 3DS Max/NWN where the object is at any given moment- merely identifing what its status at two points in time will suffice.  3DS Max/NWN fill in the "in-between" movements.  And that's "tweening".  When we use the Bake Anims, we're actually breaking this process and laying down a keyframe in every frame.  This is handy if you're using a non-Linear controller for your object (like we do with the Path Constraint), which NWN does not understand.  So we have to "dumb it down" and "spoon feed" NWN the position and rotatin information in every single frame for the object.  We don't always have to spoon feed NWN so much and sometimes we can get by without baking every single frame.  On the Bake Anims rollout, under Start Frame and End Frame, you'll see Sample Interval.  This means "Bake the controller keys every X frames", relying on the tweening to "fill in the blanks" though with one baked key every 3, 5 or even 10 frames, we're still making it easier for the engine to guess what the in-between movements should be.

Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 23 mars 2011 - 08:11 .

[Karvon]

I'd love to see these, and any others folks dream up, added to the Vault.

Karvon

[TSMDude]

Flying carpets and actual Spelljammers...or the flying city of the Shadovar....so many possibilties....

[OldTimeRadio]

Chrysoli wrote...
That did it - knowing there is a Time Configuration icon to click - who would have thought ... ! hah!

Glad that worked for you!  Even in GMax there are a million little switches and dials and it's not clear what they do.  Some of them, I think, don't even have an icon to click on.  Like Align.  If you hit Alt-A after having selected a mesh and then click on another mesh it will bring up the Align dialog, which will let you exactly align one mesh with another using their pivot points.  By selecting X, Y & Z alignment, you can exactly replace one piece with another.

At any rate - it all worked out very nice! If I had a way to record a video of it - I'd show you how it looks in game, but alas, that's not something I have access to and a screen shot will do no good.

XFire makes it really easy to take in-game videos. It'll take care of the recording, compression and uploading to the XFire site for viewing, more or less automatically. Very handy.

Thanks again you guys - really! And if anyone else could use these placeable models with the travel animation, I'd be happy to upload them somewhere for them.

If you get some spare time, upload it to the Vault. I love looking at stuff like this. Great way to get ideas.

Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 24 mars 2011 - 03:02 .

[cyberglum]

Hi all,

Sorry its been a while since last post, been busy with work etc.

Thanks for the Dummy Node tips OTR, I have the processes down pat now. Makes it a whole lot easier.

I currently have 10 speeders and 20 starships with flight animations. Its interesting how complex it can get with different sized models. A lot of the starship custom NWN models which are available are surprisingly large once you have them flying about. I've taken to scaling down the larger models to around 60%, which I've dubbed the Dougal Effect ( "No Dougal, these cows are small, those cows are far away..."). As long as you layer the scaled down, larger ships above the full scale ones you have flying about the re-scaling works quite well.

I'm still working on the landing and taking off models. Although I've fiddled about with OTR's demo hakpak I'm still not getting my head around setting up the multiple animations on a single model, but I'm sure I'll get there. I have got a couple of landing ships, but due to not quite grasping how to stop/start animations during their run, I've scripted replacing placeables for the final, landed model and am removing the animated model once its landing animation has finished. While it does work its looks a little clunky in game and its not something I'm yet happy with.

Having real fun with Gmax tho', I've downloaded several free 3d models from the net, managed to get one of them processed through Gmax and into a format NWN recognises and am working on a second. I'm quite amazed really, never would have thought I'd be doing that 3 weeks ago.

If you're interested in working on custom content models but have always felt a little daunted by the idea you should try it, I wish I had years back. Its less complex than you'd expect and while I'm only a padawan, I've learned enough (basically by watching OTR's Animation Tutorial) to be able to import models, alter geometry, animate on splines, remove bad shadows, alter bitmaps etc etc.


'Glum

P.S. - I'd also like to get some fantasy based Airships up and running. I've a few ideas for re-texturing at least one of the models I have, adding sails and other aeronautical elements. It would be the equivalent of a fantasy flying speedboat. After seeing the other content mentioned on this thread, oOKyeOo's beautiful theatre ships as well Chrysoli's work, perhaps we could get together and publish a joint Airship Hakpak...? Just a thought.

[cyberglum]

Chrysoli - No problem.

I've been working on a new skyship. I'll do it as both a landed and flying placeable. Just working on the textures right now. Once they are done I'll head into uncharted lands with trying to put together a walkable tile mesh of it.

social.bioware.com/uploads_user/757000/756604/104779.jpg

Glum

[OldTimeRadio]

Chrysoli,

The NWN engine will only bother displaying a placeable in-game if you are within a certain number of meters from it's model base.  If you have a chest on the ground on a big flat open plane and then start walking away from it, it will eventually disappear from your view- even if your view distance is set to maximum and there's no fog or anything like that.  If you start walking towards it, it will appear again.  I can't remember what the distance is, and it's not quite as cut and dried as "take one more step away and it disappears, take one step closer and it reappears", but I think it's somewhere around 35-45 meters, maybe?  Anyway, the chest sits right above its invisible model base.

When you have a flying model which is still a placeable, although the model appears to zip and fly around, the model base is still only in one spot, unmoving, just like the chest's.  And so, as you go farther away from that (invisible) model base, the higher the chance that the flying model will disappear from your view, even though it might be right over your head and even though another player who's closer to the model base might see it still over your head even though you can't!

If you happen to be moving just into and just outside of the range of the placeable you may see the moving object at some unexpected point in its animation- or not, depending (probably) on how long you've been "too far" from the model base before re-entering the area of perception.

This effect is not seen in the toolset because all sorts of distance-culling is turned off so you can see everything you've placed in the area.

Unless there's something else at play, this is almost certainly the effect you're seeing.  If you're using a script to randomly create the placeables, you could have it poll the location of a random player in the area and place the placeable (and it's invisible base) near the player who would be guaranteed to see the placeable as it zips by.  Or you could simply create a greater number of them, knowing that at any given time only x percent of the players will be seeing them which is the only real hit since they don't consume more resources on the server to keep track of- more than any other placeable, anyway.

I documented the effect in this video. When the video starts I'm standing right above/on the model's invisible model base.  Hope that helps.

Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 28 mars 2011 - 05:21 .

[cyberglum]

Please Delete.
file:///C:/Users/Matt/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot.pngfile:///C:/Users/Matt/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.pngfile:///C:/Users/Matt/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-2.pngfile:///C:/Users/Matt/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-3.pngfile:///C:/Users/Matt/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-4.pngfile:///C:/Users/Matt/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-5.pngfile:///C:/Users/Matt/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-6.png

Modifié par cyberglum, 28 mars 2011 - 10:57 .