CREATING GAME ART FOR 3D ENGINES- P10

CREATING GAME ART FOR 3D ENGINES- P10: Iwish to thank the editing team at Charles River Media (Emi Smith,Karen Gill, Jennifer Blaney, and Jenifer Niles) for their help in gettingthis book publish-ready. Thanks, too, to my technical editor, MikeDuggan. Also deserving recognition are the guys who make the TorqueGame Engine available, GarageGames, who directly or indirectly madethis book and the accompanying CD possible. In particular, I want tothank Joe Maruschak at GarageGames for the great articles and forumanswers that have helped me and many others get a handle on this engine.I...
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CREATING GAME ART FOR 3D ENGINES- P10248 Creating Game Art for 3D Engines With these changes, your character mesh should be all set to work with the Kork player biped. Export a DTS shape named player.dts to the datashapesplayer folder. (Save the old player.dts to another name first.) The 3ds Max file and the character texture should be in the same folder you export to. The next time you launch the FPS sample game, your character mesh should appear. You can find more information on exporting characters in Chapter 12.COMBINING BONES WITH BIPED What if you wanted a character with wings, eight legs, a cape, or some other keyframable accessory? Besides the option of creating a character exclusively with bones, you can add additional bones to your biped, just as we did with the helper bones in this chapter. The parts of the mesh that represent additional limbs or features can have their vertices assigned to the new bones. In Figure 10.15, three bone chains have been added to the character to serve as the skeleton for a cape. The character mesh has been turned off for clarity. A simple cape has been created from a segmented box. The left bone chain is parented to the left clavicle, the right bone chain to the right clavicle, and the middle bone chain to the neck. These bones have FIGURE 10.15 You can create a cape, wings, or additional limbs with bones. Chapter 10 Character Rigging 249 been properly named (CapeL1, etc.) and included in the Skin modifier bone list. At- tach the cape mesh to the character mesh. You can create a simple IK and controller for the bone chains to enable easier manipulation for keyframing the cape move- ment for the various animation cycles.SUMMARY We have looked at how to set up the biped to fit the mesh and how to minimize problems like collapsed vertices by using prerotated bones and helper bones. We have also reviewed how to apply a Skin modifier to the character mesh so that it rec- ognizes the biped bones, and how to use both envelopes and weighted vertex as- signments to control this relationship. We ended this chapter by looking at how rigging a robot might be different from rigging a standard character, how we can use the default player animations with our own character mesh, and how we can add bones to our biped skeleton if we want additional keyframable features. In the next chapter, we will put this rig to work, as we keyframe a run cycle.This page intentionally left blankCHAPTER11 CHARACTER ANIMATION In This Chapter • Implementing Character Animation Concepts • Distinguishing Animation Methods • Animating with Biped • Creating the Root Pose • Animating the Root Cycle • Animating a Run Cycle • Animating a Back (Backwards Run) Cycle • Animating a Side (Strafe) Cycle • Animating Jump, Fall, and Land Cycles • Animating the Death Fall 251252 Creating Game Art for 3D EnginesIMPLEMENTING CHARACTER ANIMATION CONCEPTS The following concepts only scratch the surface, but they are of particular impor- tance for generating action cycles for a game character. Applying Counterpose In a run, when the right leg is forward and the left leg is back, the left arm is forward and the right arm is back. When the right hip is forward, the left shoulder is back. This is called counterpose because the body parts are in opposite positions. In fact, much of what the human body naturally does is done in counterpose. With our character holding a rifle, the arm movement is somewhat constrained, but it is pos- sible to rotate the entire upper body to counter what the hips are doing and thus make the overall movement more realistic. Avoiding Twins or Twinning When both sides of the character move the same way, the result doesn’t look authen- tic; an example would be if both of the character’s arms lift up at the same time in the root animation. Try to avoid “moving in twins”; instead, lift one arm, bend one leg, lift one shoulder, and so on, to give the character a more natural movement. Using Arcs for Natural Movement As you are keyframing the hands and feet, remember that natural movement is de- scribed in arcs. The legs don’t move in a linear path between keyframes; they move in arcs, and you need additional keyframes to describe this. This is especially the case ...