g'day, i'm trying to learn to animate and one major stumbling block i've encountered with animation is that i start a skeleton with good intentions but then get sidetracked into making a fancy mesh for it. so i decided to restrict myself to an very basic mesh and then get on with making animations for it. here's what i made....

it's pretty low poly, only 234 triangles. i made it from simple blocks, then marked all the seams, uvmapped it with gaps between each square face and baked ambient occlusion into a black texture. i then loaded the resulting texture into gimp and gave it some gaussian blur, this softened the shading and let some of the black around the uvmapping bleed onto the visible squares, giving it a kind of pencil sketch type effect along the edges.

it's got a working skeleton and now i need to make some animations for it. i'll probably knock together some fairly rough ones, for two reasons. (1) i want to see it in the game as soon as possible and (2) i'm an animation noob.

if anyone wants to take a closer look, the blend file is available HERE.

That is the best looking block robot model that I've seen for Nexuiz today.

Bravo

On a serious note....I'm getting the impression that animation of models is one of the hardest things to figure out within the realm of Nexuiz editing.

Zuriastrad, why bother with the smaller blocks on the face? Why not just skin on a face?

Dokujisan-
yeah, animation is pretty scary. i think this is why i normally get sidetracked into spending time on the mesh instead, my brain is trying to save me from the horrors of animation.

bengreenwood-
it was laziness on my part, by using the blocks i could let blender's texture baking do the shadows on the face instead of spending time trying to make something decent in gimp.

zuriastrad wrote:Dokujisan-
yeah, animation is pretty scary.

I find rigging the hardest thing. With low poly and only weights 0/1 allowed, it is hard to make the mesh deform properly at the joints. In this regard, the block robot should be easy, since it has no joints.

rebecca- i think someone might have mentioned the all-or-nothing weight painting on irc. i'd kind of hoped they were mistaken about it because that sounds like a nightmare to work with. is that a limitation of the zym format?

I like the player models as they are, but the bots should all look at least similar and this "low-bot" would be perfect.

zuriastrad wrote:rebecca- i think someone might have mentioned the all-or-nothing weight painting on irc. i'd kind of hoped they were mistaken about it because that sounds like a nightmare to work with. is that a limitation of the zym format?

Mmh, I think I picked that up somewhere in the forum, but I don't know for sure. I hoped someone who knows would answer to this post... I think I'll experiment a bit the next days with a test model.

I can't find the forum thread that I had in mind anymore.

So I've made a test model with six vertexes and two bones, where two of the vertexes were assigned to both of the bones with weights 0.6 and 0.4. But in the game, the vertexes were acting as if they were assigned exclusively to one of the bones. Well...

that's a pity.

I've had a look at the zmodel source and found a comment which makes me hope that *maybe* it is possible to get weights to work, see here: http://alientrap.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=37267

that would be great if it works out. obviously the weight painting on this model is a basic as it comes, but i'm hoping to do something more subtle in future.

well, i'm making good progress. i've got my model to appear in the game, even if it's only animation is standing still. i've scaled it somewhere near to the correct size and shifted the vertical position till it is touching the ground. it just glides around completely motionless, but it's a step in the right direction.

next i concentrated on getting the skin working. i made a skin called blockbot.tga and put it in a folder called textures in my pk3. i edited blockbot.smd (the mesh) to replace all the lines which said skin with blockbot.tga. the model now has a shiny red skin in the game. thanks again to ihsan for his pyria template, it's a massive help.

here's the download page for my first pk3

I'm so glad that people are using the template. Feel free to update and fix it. (GPL baby)

for the linux users, here's how i replaced skin with blockbot.tga in my blockbot.smd model file.

sed -i 's/skin/blockbot.tga/g' blockbot.smd

more progress. i've added the "bip01 r hand" bone to my model. this is the one that the weapon attaches to. i parented it to the right hand bone of my skeleton. the gun was upside down to start with, so i had to rotate the bone 180 degrees around it's axis in pose mode to fix that. works ok now.

i was having to scale the model down to 0.021% in config-zym.txt, which seemed a bit messy. so i scaled both the skeleton and mesh down by that amount in blender and set the scale in config-zym.txt to 1. doesn't really make any difference, but it's tidier.

latest pk3

ok, i'm trying out some basic animations now. i've got an idle.smd which is one frame of animation standing still and i have a crude run.smd where the legs just waggle back and forth. the problem is that whichever animation comes first in config-zym.txt just runs all the time, regardless of whether i am standing still or running. if i have...

Code: Select all

output "blockbot"
scale 1
origin 0 0 23
rotate 90
mesh mesh.smd
scene idle.smd fps 10
scene run.smd fps 22

...then my model glides around the map motionless, but if i have...

Code: Select all

output "blockbot"
scale 1
origin 0 0 23
rotate 90
mesh mesh.smd
scene run.smd fps 22
scene idle.smd fps 10

...it runs all the time, even when i'm not moving.

is this because i don't have the complete set of animations?

yep. looks like it was because there wasn't a full set of animations. i copied the idle animation to all of the other animations except run.smd, which i have a basic one for already. i built them all into the zym and everything seems to work, if i stand still the model is idle and if i move forward it switches to the run cycle.

been busy again. i got annoyed with having dead robot's still standing so i made a death animation and used it for both die1 and die2.

also, i've been working on how to get coloured skins in ctf. i'd assumed that there were just coloured skins, like in quake3, but i was pleased to find nexuiz's system where the _pants and _shirt skins are coloured by preferences or turned to team colours in a ctf game. since i wanted the entire robot to change colour i put all of the texuring into blockbot_shirt.tga and replaced blockbot.tga with a 16x16 black square. this means that all the texturing on the bot is colour changable.

the only weird bit that i noticed was that even though i used a _shirt texture i had to change the pants colour in the setting to get any effect. i'll try making a _pants texture aswell and seeing if that helps. pretty odd bug really.

latest bot pk3

I'm starting to really like this model. Feel free to upload it to Ouns.

thanks 4m. i might do that.

i took bengreenwood's advice and ditched the blocks in the face so now the model is down to 204 triangles, which is pretty low.

also, i wasn't happy with the messy uvmapping so i spent a while re-doing it from scratch. i wanted to get more detail in parts that would get more attention so i uvmapped the model with this grid texture that i've made...

...and started resizing the uvmapping. the grid texture makes it very easy to see where the detail is. in the end i ended up with this...

...with the bulk of the detail on the face and chestplate. also i put more detail into the upper body and arms than in the legs. i also mirrored the arms and legs so both sides share the same texture on the uvmap. this means the arms and legs are limited to being symmetrical, but that's ok for this particular model. this is what it looks like now i've baked the AO into the skin...

...i'm not actually doing anything with the extra detail i packed into the face and chestplate, but at least it's there if anyone wanted to re-skin it.