HENDRIX

Dec 11 2013, 03:39 PM

Yeah that can be done but will take some time to realize...

HENDRIX

Dec 11 2013, 12:55 PM

Got the whole mating coding procedure done, mostly adapted from the tragopan. it can now build it's own nests.

HENDRIX

Dec 11 2013, 04:45 PM

Not quite: The tragos have to enter the nest by the TAP but then they lay eggs and these are put on the surface and the babies are there too. You just can't make them enter it by walking because they teleport then.

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Ah well, you could definitely contribute to it. I'm in my exams period at university atm, so I don't have the time to complete it and I also lost the inspiration, which turns the fun of designing into that nuisance of finishing.


Hmm, I never really used much of a tutorial on animating, other than the gus gingerbread man tutorial. It's kinda intuitive with very few stuff you can learn from books. You need a good eye for the motions, and refine the anim again and again. One thing that's different from there & the end result we get in ZT2 is that my bird rig is set up to use Inverse Kinematics, IK solvers. That allows for posing extremities like feet just by moving the target bone, instead of having to rotate every bone of the chain manually. So you simply keyframe the IK bones and then let the script calculate all the rotations for the ZT2 bones.

Anyway, I've written the basic guideline how to get the stuff ingame. I've set up my bird rig nicely in blender so all that has to be done to create a new anim is:
1. animate the IK version of the rig with constraints
2. bake the movements to the ZT2 version of the IK using the bake animation script
3. clean up the baked action by using the clean animation curves script
4. remove all channels for non-skeletal nodes & IK targets to achieve a better performance
5. export
6. have vg convert it

On all anims, ALWAYS insert a keyframe for Bip01 & Bip01 NonAccum, even on static ones. Bip01 should at time 0 always be 0 loc 0 rotation, and Bip01NonAccum should always be 0 for all values in blender. It looks different in nifskope though.

The walking running animations are something it took me a bit to figure out, but it's not really difficult. First thing you do is animate a walkcycle, obviously. The important thing is that the forward (or sideward & turn) movement comes only from the Bip01 bone. And that's about it. You do just one cycle.

So here is the blend file, a few comments:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/20skcbs0vqlvf7d/f_n2myVbQ5/JayFIXED%20Bip01.blend

the models (two because the last thing I animated was the mating) are on layer 1
the IK rig is on layer 2
and one of the dozens of bake anims is left on layer 3

each anim baking creates a new armature you can delete that after baking, but you have to secure the animation block first, click the F next to the X next to the anim name in the action editor to make sure it will be kept when you close blender! I forgot to do that sometimes, so not all anims are available in blender anymore, which is kinda annoying.

That was a wall of text, if you got questions, ask And have fun with the bird