venomgfx | 
04 17th, 2008
hey ho! my very first post!, luckily WordPress looks the same everywhere =)
Oookay, what to say.. today is a week and a day since i’m here. Got to know all all the Peach team, I even assisted to the Premiere! (pretty awesome btw), but they are almost all gone now, Sacha and Williams are still here in nl, yesterday Nathan went back home (told me to give 1 hug per person a day!, i’m on it). So that’s it, all the institute for us, is Apricot Time!.
My very first day in the institute I started working on the lowpoly version of Frankie, and trying to figure out with the team how-much of the BigBuckBunny rigging could be used; after long time thinking..and thinking.. nothing, we will have to make all riggings from scratch 🙁 , why? because of MDef.. oh! and because of the almost 400 bones that this rigging have (amazing ha? you’ll see it by yourself).
So, after making a simple rigging and some shapekeys to see how things work so far, was about time to make the main animations for developers to work with the all new and shiny CS animation system.
I never imagine that there are SO many animations in a game!, for example, lets say.. a walking animation. OK.
Walking, is not just ‘walking’, you can:
Stand 2 Walk / Walk Faster 2 Walk / Run 2 Walk / Run Faster 2 Walk / Jump 2 Walk, and the opposite!, Walk 2 Stand, Walk 2 Run, Walk 2 Jump, and sooo many variations for each one of the animations (there are a few more basic animations but i don’t want to spoil people : )
Luckily, the NLA editor helps us a lot when trying to visualize how they will match each animation, and to see if the transition animations are necessary or not. Just made this little video to show you a little bit of this work, it’s a little bit speed up to not to bore you too much.
Apricot – Firsts Animations from Pablo Vazquez on Vimeo.
Ok, first post done, pressure gone. i hope you enjoy!
venomgfx
good work pablo! looks like you will have a lot of work!! and fun ! jejej…
saludos y posteen seguido che! 😉
Great work so far! Glad you are able to join the team with this game and post really good blog entries! looks like this game is coming along nicely! Can’t wait till it is completed!
That was very cool.
already hard at work! cool beans! must be tough as the newcomer, especially with the peach team leaving, but it sounds like you are fitting right in. it also sounds like things are really moving over there, please keep us informed, the development is really exciting. ( and i don’t even play videogames! but i am planning on starting. )
Look great I can`t wait too play this game
thanks of the cool vid post
Wow! I can see how much you’re enjoying whit that!
Beware the clocks, rigging & animation produces dependency…
And have good notes to tell everything to us, at the Blendiberia!
This has got to be the most productive thing I’ve seen on the blog.
Bummer to hear that the old rigs can’t be implemented. I just hope re-rigging the characters won’t be to bothersome and you keep your spirit up. Good things happen when you’re having fun.
Luckely the Apricot shooting bazooka doesn’t have any rigging so it can be implemented straight away.
Some obscure cigarete smoking man in a dark alley spoke to me after the premiere of Big Buck Bunny.
He handed me some interesting data from the Blender institute regarding the Apricot shooting bazooka.
When i find time and i shake of those men in black that are following me i’ll try to post them to prove it exists.
i think the institute could make a fortune by just recording everything being done and selling it as a dvd set.
Great to see your first post, Venom. It’s exciting to see the “life” being pumped into the game, so to speak.
this is gonna be an AWESOME game!!! can’t wait to mod it
Hey, congrats!!!, your work is awsome !!!
Thanks for the great blog entry Pablo!
Que tengas suerte, chato 😉
Desde España te deseamos que, además de currar, te diviertas y aprendas mucho 😀
No les dejes el listón demasiado alto… si no, nos acabarán cogiendo tirria 😛
Suerte ;D
Hey amazing post! Thanks a lot Venom.
It would be nice see something about how the animation sistem interacts with gameplay. 🙂
I’m curious as to why you need many different walking animations.
Can’t you just do animation blending in the vertex buffer?
Have u considered using blend parameters.They are used in hl2 and unreal.instead of making walk->run transition u simple add a blending factor ‘movetype’.
u blend from’walk’ to ‘run’ animation
using a blendfactor.ie at movefactor value 0 the model walks and at 1.0 the model will run.
this way u can go from walk to run
by incrementing the value from 0 -> 1.0
u can also go a step further and add a
‘movedir’ and blend between walk_left,walk_right,walk_front,walk_back.
check out the unreal3 animation system.
its entirely nodebased,u would have to make big changes to the animation system but well worth it.
Thanks to all for the nice comments, y Gracias a todos! 🙂
About the blending, yes we will use that, the NLA editor is helping us to see how each animation fit with each other, but there are some situations where you just can’t use blending, sometimes because they don’t match, and sometimes because it looks just boring 😀
is a fun and furry short movie based game!, we want this to be very animated, as much as we can without taking playability or making transitions too long (who wants to wait more than a second just to see the pretty animation between run and walk, i don’t, player wants quick reaction, smoother as possible, but quick, is a squirrel!, not a mechwarrior 🙂 ).
btw, another quickie animation test in OGL, at: http://vimeo.com/910658
cheers! and thanks for your support.
🙂 i didnt mean u should blend from walk to stand.yea that would suck.
i meant play ‘walk’ and ‘run’ simultaneously and blend between them.this way the character will walk at 0,run at 1.0 and ‘walk slowly’ at 0.5.
it would be cool if blender had an editor for combining animations this way.
also check out the unreal3 animation editor:
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/media/Banners/ue3-animation-animtree.jpg
buenisimo boludooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaa
(internal joke. sorry folks)
Keep it up !
monk: thats what we planning already, but raw linear interpolation between 2 animations sucks.
We blending not only walk->run, but we blending between 4 animations + transitions between them (so it’s + 3). So in fact we doing the same what unreal but we mixing 7 not 2 animations = which is ultra high quality.
About using it in blender, hhmmmm hard to say at this moment, we have biiig todo list already 🙂 Maybe…
Greetings
hey there.
I don’t have Flash and GNash doesn’t like those embeds. is there any chance of ogg versions in the future?
Cheers
Tim
Hey Tim, if you don’t have Flash i assume you have AMD64 linux;
click on my name to get a guide
I love the walk animation. Great job.
NathanKP – Inkweaver Review
Didn’t think of it till just now but yall could just layer the animations.
Animated and Key each body part indepenently. I will try and make an example soon.
@randomnut – cheers, it’s not really ideal though.
Actually, I don’t have flash because I don’t have any proprietary software on my computer.
I only use Free and Open Source Software on my computer and unfortunately, GNASH (the reverse engineered version of flash), isn’t very good at video yet.
Ogg video is great, because then people like me – an important part of the community – can view your work.
Can’t wait for you to release it, what I have seen looks awesome,
keep up the good work!
+1 request for the OGG files but could I also ask a favor? For those of who run separate media players for audio and video, could you use the .ogv extension per Xiph’s recommendation? http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/MIME_Types_and_File_Extensions
It makes file management that much easier!
wmzmkvuy5ng06nnk