[SOLVED] - MultiPart actors and animations

santiago-gamer · March 10, 2012, 1:19am

Hi panda forum!!

I’m thinking in a method of make some sort of character creator (I haven’t done anything yet, so its fully “theoretical”), and I have a doubt about multi-part actors:

If I have a lot of parts for my actor, with different geometry but same skeleton, can I use the same animations for all of them?

Example: I export from blender a torso (“torso-1”) and it’s animations separately, and then, export another torso (“torso-2”) with different geometry but with the same armature, --> can I use the animations of torso-1 in torso-2??? (this is to avoid exporting all the animations, and have only the necessary files)

Sorry for my English

Thanks in advance!!!

santiago-gamer · March 10, 2012, 2:19am

I found this:

benchang:

I bet you’d prefer to have all the clothes and armor be individual files, to be more extensible. Another method is to make each of those its own actor, and then have them positioned and animated in sync with the actor for your character. Export each of these with the same base skeleton bound onto it; since the joints will all have the same name, you can apply the same animation onto them at the same time and it will look just like they’re part of the same model.

This might sound inefficient at first, because you end up with multiple skeletons moving around on top of each other instead of just one. However, moving joints around is cheap; it’s the skin deformation that’s expensive and you have the same number of vertices moving around in either case.

And it makes your workflow much much easier. You do still have to weight the individual clothes properly, but you will always need to do that no matter what. I usually start by just transferring the skin weights from the underlying body mesh onto each piece of clothing; in many cases that’s actually all you have to do.

on this thread:
[url]Actor Fashion, Gear, Armor - How To - #13 by silveralex]

So I think that it’s possible!!

When I get some sample of this working I’ll post it.

However, if you guys know something about this subject, I’ll appreciate the info.

Bye.

silveralex · March 10, 2012, 12:15pm

Hi, I have recently been working on this receently and it works great.

We have a model with many optional parts (hats, gloves, boots) and we hide and unhide them with code.
Note that this means that our 1 egg file contains the multiple parts.

We use a single set of animations and that works fine.

santiago-gamer · March 10, 2012, 5:51pm

Thanks silveralex!! glad to hear that someone got it working! but anyway I’ll try the method with separate egg files for every piece of model. When I have that working I’ll post it here!!

Thanks for your reply!!

silveralex · March 10, 2012, 6:49pm

I’ve done a little on the attaching other models as well. Will use it more for weapons that a player picks up, etc.

Let me know if you get stuck and I’ll try to help. (but I’m learning as I go, too!)