13. May 2015, 19:55:31

#1025

voodoo47Quote

Quote by RocketMan_Remote:

The height thing goes back to my earlier woes about using the same skeleton on different models of different proportions.  I could preserve the height and move the planes around but in the past that has tended to cause me more grief with the animations than vice-versa.

no idea what to say - if the problem with the crushed knees is fixed, then go for whatever feels right, I suppose.

Quote by RocketMan_Remote:

The toes are inherently messed up in vanilla.  You will notice that every AI walks on the outside edge and tip of their toes and ONLY looks right when in the T-Pose and sometimes when idling.  Whenever they are actually doing anything like running, attacking, etc., the feet contort into some stupid scrunched up shape.

again, not quite sure what to say, but I did a little dance with the two ladies from the last picture and I have to say that the old feet looked better (read: less weird). I guess my recommendation would be to leave the toes alone/closer to the orig models. I hope I'm not going to regret recommending this sometime later.

Quote by Olfred:

And here you see why I hate working with rebirth 

well, it's the best we've got at the moment - trust me, I'd love to get it off the recommended list and replace it with something proper, but no luck so far.

13. May 2015, 19:59:02

#1026

RocketMan_RemoteQuote

Let me provide a run-down of the issues that may need some discussion going forward with regards to re-rigging the AI:

1) Toe angles are generally screwed up on most models and need to be bent on the static pose to make the dynamic position look good.

2) Model proportions are all different on rebirth with no particular regard to plane or vhot placement.  While Cyberblutch was able to make the models function in-game without any catastrophic failures, they really aren't set up properly and attempting to do so requires a broad spectrum of difficulty in modifying the model and/or planes.  In some cases, this is near impossible.

3) The vanilla animations aren't great and the biggest problem I've come across is extreme bending and rotation angles when performing certain animations, like melee swings, shooting and death.  These animations CAN sometimes take a cylinder of polygons and rotate them more than 360 degrees about its axis, causing pinch points and visual artifacts that look terrible (like the bent shotgun in the death pose).  These cannot be fixed properly without editing the animation because fixing these problems only does so for a certain pose.  All other poses are necessarily broken so you have to live with either 1 being totally broken or all of being mostly broken.

4) Head tracking is disabled on all rebirth models because there are no neck planes defined.  Since they were never there, the models weren't designed to accommodate them so it's shear luck if you can fit them in there without butchering the mesh.

5) Vhots for melee contact points or muzzle points are off but I consider this to be a minor problem.  They can always be moved or the arms can be rotated slightly into place.


When it comes to Rebirth, I suggest shooting for a minimal baseline of Fit, Form and Function.  Trying to fix everything to look nice is likely impossible without more significant repair of more than 1 resource.

13. May 2015, 20:04:00

#1027

RocketMan_RemoteQuote

Hmm.. I'm not sure if you're able to get a screenshot of the foot phenomenon that you say is weird.  I totally could be missing something so I'm not going to jump the gun and say everything is ok but when I did go into game mode after bending the feet, they were straight as an arrow when she dashed at me all around the room.  Same with the hybrids.  Literally the only time the feet looked bad was on the hybrid during 1 idle animation when he was sort of leaning on 1 leg, as people tend to do when tired.  Every other time the feet were straight and flat.

13. May 2015, 20:10:55

#1028

voodoo47Quote

understood and agreed - unless someone else wants to add something, I'd say let's go with whatever you feel is right/is the path of least resistance. it's not about making the models perfect, just about making them NOT screw up other mods.


//nope, the  new midwife feet were bending weirdly every once in a while when I was dancing around them, while the old ones were fine (sometimes clipping into the ground a bit more than they should, but still ok). could make a video if you want. //nope, this hunk of junk is not able to capture in an usable resolution with decent framerates.

13. May 2015, 23:48:17

#1029

OlfredQuote

Mhh.... I would say it would be a wise idea to just wait out for PinkDot to release his AI Tools.
As far as I understood his plans there will be proper importing of the skeleton with already assigned vertex groups connected to the bones. And, you can edit the vertex groups and bones and just export it.
No need for stupid restricting planes, no need for boxes somewhere on the model to kinda do the impressions of proper bones.

Many biped models use the same set of animations. And as we all know by know, the animations itself are pretty buggy/unclean. So what have been done to compensate for it, was creating different skeletons for each model to kinda get it look right, instead of using one skeleton for all models and just clean the animation mess up.
So what cyberblutch did for the rebirth models is to kinda screw and mess around with the skeletons. Now each models does have a different skeleton. Using one skeleton for all models is bound to get you fucked.

As there is something in the make to get the job done in 15 minutes instead of 15 hours, I really deeply suggest to wait it out.