"Proper" khajit and argonian bodyshapes/animations

[AndyDaMage]

Also it's a great reference for "believable" anthropomorphic anatomy and proportions.

 

I was immediately remembered of my own very first attempts when I saw the hilariously frog-like Argonian in the video above.

The first version of my dragon feet meshes was far too big!

 

 

As shown in my latest progress reports I'm now going the "skeletal alteration" approach myself as well.

 

 

I was very pleased realizing clothes and armor automatically deform according to the "scale" of the underlying bones, which is all that was altered in the above comparison.

 

However, so far I was unable to get this "size" information to stay on exported skeletons' bones. I can use an idle animation to set the size of the bones though at any time.

 

The only real trouble is with existing animations. They can basically "undo" every skeletal changes you did, as well as they can introduce them in the first place. There's obviously not much use in including translational or scale data for bones which are part of the skeletal structure (when does one's arm grow in thickness or one's neck elongate ever in any natural motion??), but still most existing animations seem to have been done by just selecting all bones each frame and inserting a keyframe for just about everything there is every time. This of course makes it impossible to make real use of an altered skeleton anatomy, unless you're introducing said "inbetween" bones, which are not affected by existing animations. But as my dragons will not be moving like any other species and most likely no existing animation will look right on them, I'm going the route to give them their very own unique set of animations already anyways, so there will be no animations undoing my skeletal alterations ever as a side bonus.

 

Using this approach many alterations to equipment will be done by the underlying bones for me and there's only the really different body meshes (feet mainly) which need adapted meshes for items to be wearable anymore. And my scripting approach can proficiently take care of this for me already. I'm getting rid of more and more flaws with every new OBSE release. There's no "item becomes fully repaired during exchange" issues anymore already and the "no OnEquip blocks trigger when equipped through scripts"-issue is non-existent now either. I only need to take care of cloneFormed items to be recognized as their originals by GetEquipped, GetEquippedObject, GetEquipmentSlotMask or "GetItemCount" checks in other mods, for quests to still recognize the items they check for although it's actually an adapted counterpart. But I was talking with Scruggs about a solution similar to the "race alias" already and last time I heard from him things were looking positive.

 

edit: Isn't there a way to get those images to display smaller in this forum?! Had to spoiler them because of their size, but it's just getting worse.

 

Trust me when I say this, creating all the animations again to adjust for the skeleton change is not fun nor easy, plus using dummy bones lets you make adjusts much later on without needing to them redo all the animations again.

 

I use a dummy bone on my centaurs so that at any time I can modify the scale of the two half (for example, I recently upped the horse size to a scale of 0.9 after getting many requests for it to be larger), and it also meant that when I was asked to move the human half forward a bit on the horse, it only meant a quick value change rather then what would have been impossible value change for the 60 odd animatinos I have. Just so you know, if you want it to be fully functional, there are around 300+ animations that the game uses for the palyer, not to mention then all the idle anims that arent changed with the player skeleton.

 

I would suggest a combination of the two, make your scale/rotation changes with the dummies so that they can use exsisting animations and look fine, but then you can go back and change just the specific animations that you want to, and it can be more ongoing....instead of missing animations that you having finished yet, it will just use the default. It also means that if later on you arent happy with one of the skeleton changes, you can quickly modify it without having to edi every animation to update it.

 

The biggest problem with scaling bones like that in nifskope, is that blender will get very very confused about it.....seems that in blender bones cant have a scale, expect in animations (which i think is where you had a problem). Dunno if that'll get fixed in a later update of nifscripts, but they do know about it. Just means you need to keep a non-scaled skeleton around to create animations from.

Edited May 8, 2011 by da mage

[razorpony]

You guys are highlighting the reasons why I just stick to meshes. :yes:

 

Razorpony

[Semtex]

I'm interested in this topic. For some time I have an idea or "project "- to create a group of "traditional" creatures from Greek myths as a playable race, or at least as an NPC. So far I have committed Minotaur, Satyr, Faun and Pan. Project Winged Twilight / harpy has a ready models, but standing on my little skills in scripting and the use of animation - I want them to fly.

Centaur created by da mage fits into my project idea. Once I have made several attempts to create an centaur, but I always failed.

 

In my idea of ​​a centaur looks like this:

 

http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/8260/kentaur31.jpg

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/5012/kentaur32.jpg

http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/5527/kentaur33.jpg

http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/2756/kentaur35.jpg

 

 

Now da mage created a functional skeleton and animations that work well on a player's character.

My first attempt to connect this mesh to the skeleton ended up terribly. The model when was exporting from Gmax was ominously distorted and unusable... Even further attempts did not fare well. Somewhere I probably did a mistake.

 

well... I prove them the another way - I placed into skeleton an dummy bones, as described by da mage.

Bingo! - this works!

The result is displayed on the next series of pictures

 

 

Adjusted Skeleton

http://img543.imageshack.us/img543/8821/kentaur40.jpg

 

Comparison

White body - my "idealized" centaur

Black body - centaur body created by da mage and my modified skeleton (originaly created by da mage)

http://img805.imageshack.us/img805/2222/kentaur39.jpg

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/8831/kentaur38.jpg

 

 

[Semtex]

After the first experiments in NifSkope it appears that the modified skeleton will work fine.On the test animations have been no artifacts, and the body bends on the right places.

 

Samples -

 

 

The skin is changed to white

http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/20/kentaur41.jpg

 

http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/6618/kentaur43.jpg

 

http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/7194/kentaur44.jpg

 

http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/2405/kentaur51.jpg

 

http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/1086/kentaur52.jpg

 

http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/8496/kentaur53.jpg

 

http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/6715/kentaur54.jpg

 

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/3194/kentaur55.jpg

 

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/9022/kentaur56.jpg

 

 

 

But one problem is quite visible - big clipping between human and horse body parts in front view.

 

http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/8084/kentaur57.jpg

 

This will have to somehow Ways to hide, camouflage, probably with new textures.

[AndyDaMage]

But one problem is quite visible - big clipping between human and horse body parts in front view.

 

That's caused by not having the correct bone weights in that area. I dont know about yours, but I have had to specifically not modify the human torso, so the top line of the horse's neck (where the join is) actaully get rigged to the pelvis rather then a horse bone. Of course for yours you wouldnt have to do that, but you might wana to match up weight for the huamn and horse parts in the area around the join.

Edited May 9, 2011 by da mage

[DrakeTheDragon]

In my case I'm perfectly fine with redoing really "all" animations for my dragons. One might call me crazy or a fool for always choosing the most tedious of solutions, but in case of my dragons it can't be helped. What little anatomy changes I did so far is nothing compared to what's still to come. I was thinking it through forth and back several times and there's no way I could re-use even a single existing animation once I'm done with it. This is not due to the approach with skeletal changes but the intended difference in shape and anatomy I'm aiming at. I might come back to this dummy bones idea (I don't like the name, they're far more than just dummies after all) at some point, but the animations I'm redoing don't have this unnecessary dirty data in them (almost exclusively rotational data) and can still be used, even if I alter the anatomy further, as long as it doesn't differ far too much all of a sudden. But such a dramatic change in design is unlikely after I started redoing animations already.

 

First of all I have to investigate this "specialIdle" or "idleanims" mechanism though. If they aren't also redirected to an "idleanims" subfolder in my new skeleton&animations folder, this might indeed become a little troublesome and cause heavy incompatibility to other mods, which I was hoping to prevent with this approach in the first place. But I'll see about this when it's time for it. There's far more different things to be done first. This and I still need a scripted solution for 1st person before this can move close to release ever. But I don't get much free time anyways lately, so this will all take its time.

[AndyDaMage]

This and I still need a scripted solution for 1st person before this can move close to release ever. But I don't get much free time anyways lately, so this will all take its time.

 

I asked scruggs to look into a function for it again, and he siad he'd try again for the next OBSE BETA, if there is no mention of it when the next BETA is started I'll remind him again about it.

[Semtex]

That's caused by not having the correct bone weights in that area. I dont know about yours, but I have had to specifically not modify the human torso, so the top line of the horse's neck (where the join is) actaully get rigged to the pelvis rather then a horse bone. Of course for yours you wouldnt have to do that, but you might wana to match up weight for the huamn and horse parts in the area around the join.

Yes, I understand this.

The problem is that - I can not fix it.

When I load the bone and skin in to Gmax (in Blender I can not handle), the model is very distorted and unusable. It looks like this :wallbash: :

 

 

http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/369/kentaur60.jpg

 

 

Adjusted skeleton works quite well in the game.

http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/4742/kentaur61.jpg http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/5468/kentaur62.jpg

 

visual error is just this

 

http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/4262/kentaur63.jpg

 

 

I think, this error could be repaired by removing links to human skeleton in the horse part labeled "Horse_Upper". But this can not be done in Gmax, as well as your original skeleton and the skin is distorted after loading in to Gmax.

 

Edit: Here is my modified skeleton

Edited May 9, 2011 by Semtex

[AndyDaMage]

Some pointers when using my mesh....because im using dummy bones to scale it (at least in the case for blender, and also it seems gmax) the skeleton wont work for it.

 

I lost my working copy a few weeks (its stuck on a damaged external, Im still waiting for it to get recovered), so I'm unable to send you my in-work skeleton/meshes (which are much more updated then the ones in the alpha). Bascially though, you need to remove the scaling from the skeleton, there is one called TotalScaler which is located above bip01. Then there is also ScalerBone located at the join. Set the scale on both of these bones to 1 and then try it again. I had a skeleton i used in-game, and one that i used for blender (when i was making meshes or animations).

 

This is the one reason Im not afriad anyone will ever steal my work, I have a lot of really complex processes I go thorugh to get things working.

Edited May 9, 2011 by da mage

[Semtex]

Modified skeleton and the skin works well. Preview of the tests:

vanilla body

http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/2948/kentaur76.th.jpg http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/6747/kentaur75.th.jpg

Robert's Male body v5, Robert's Female body, HGEC Female body

http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/5359/kentaur71.th.jpg

http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/982/kentaur70a.th.jpg http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/8115/kentaur74.th.jpg http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/9209/kentaur73.th.jpg

 

Minor adjustments on skin will be need for HGEC female body.

 

For the male characters will be need an automatically deployed pants (with body texture). Because ... :whistling:

 

http://img864.imageshack.us/img864/5796/kentaur72oops.th.jpg

This ensures by a simple script.

 

I will try to create new textures for the human body, that will create a transition between human and horse body visually more smooth.

 

da mage

Steal your work??? :wacko: :down:

Take this as an offer to cooperate. You have created something that strongly attracted me. Therefore I use your work to create my vision of Centaurus.

 

edit: stupid imageshack - full horse body is ok, but half horse not :biggrin:

Edited May 11, 2011 by Semtex