GOAT and GOAL: A collection of modelling and animation utilities

[Icedie El Guaraní]

That is incredible bwain , signifierone don´t ignore me dude!!
Hey Bwian i made a 2h model with the elephant heaters and footers but the unit done blow units in the air when is attacking. i will upload my text file soon.

[KnightErrant]

Well I'd like to add my own observations to this. Bwian, as always,
is too kind, the problem with the animations was an error on my part.
The horse is different from all the other units: camels, elephants, humans,
and siege_engines. These all have unit scaling but the horses have
their skeletons too small, a factor of 1.12. descr_skeleton.txt deals
with this by including a scale command of "scale 1.12". The header
says this scales the skeletons by 1.12. So the fiction maintained by the
Python GOAT meshconverter is to introduce a "scaled" skeleton that is
larger than the one in the .cas files. This is done so users can do
animmerge and animextract and have things work as they imagine.
The problem happened when we exported this artificially large skeleton
to an animation family; the skeleton was too large and then the scale
command made it even larger. End result: weird animation effects in the
game because the correct rotations of the anims were being applied to a
bad skeleton. So the "cure" is this: in the workflow, you use the big
skeleton whenever you do stuff in Milkshape. Only when you
are done and want to export the new skeleton, with or without extra
bones, the exportskeleton function has a new fourth dialog that
lets you scale the skeleton by any factor, in this case 1.12. That makes
the skeleton back to the original size. In essence, you scale the skeleton
down so the game can scale it back up.

(Sigh) I know this sounds convoluted, but it works. This by itself merits a bug-fix re-release of
GOAT, but King Kong has found some problems with siege_engines,
JMRC has found some problems with the human meshconverter, Aetagina
has found improvements with the RTW model converter, etc. When I
can get this all sorted out, I'll do a GOAT 1.1 release with all the
corrections; just want to wait until the chariots are riding roughshod
over their hapless opponents. Many thanks to people who have used
GOAT with all its faults and reported them back so it can be made
better.

[Bwian]

Icedie ... you need to make sure you have 'launching' in the descr_unit section for the weapon attributes. This should get the bodies flying. The attack should have the attributes of the elephant units as a guide.

[SigniferOne]

KE, you're the man.

[Condottiere SOG]

Nice to have you, Bwian. Much respect.

+rep from days gone by................

[Bwian]

Made some more progress last night.

The double horses are in place, and I have text edited the animation files to remove the stock horses extreme rotations in the hooves. All tested and functional.

Due to the limitations on the total number of bones we can have, the tail has been 'stolen' to make part of the chariot. Not a big sacrifice to be honest!

Before I had to call it a night, I have zeroed out the tail bone movement, added an extra 'axle' bone and rigged the chariot mesh to the bones.

KE has knocked up a script to allow me to automatically generate a reverse set of animations. The plan is to have a tiny bone between h_saddle and hte chariot proper with a reverse set of rotations to bone_h_saddle. This should counteract rotations and mean the chariot will stay pretty much still. The hope is that this will save a lot of time damping out the movement of the horse as it walks being transmitted into the chariot to make it wobble. It will still move and bounce a bit. this is untested, but should work OK. With the chariot stable, I can test the chariot properly for height. Might involve a couple of re-builds to get the wheel height spot on.... but I expect that!

Assuming all that works ( will test tonight ) the only thing left to do is make the wheels turn and then convert the headers to elephant ones so I can add extra riders. Turning wheels will be easy enough to do in text format. If there are 20 frames, and I want 2 full rotations...then I just change the thing by 36 degrees per frame. If that fails, I might have to do it in MS3D...but even then, that won't be too hard.

Unless it all goes wrong, a christmas release of an alpha chariot is a definitle possibility.

[Icedie El Guaraní]

Here you can have mind, i made it but the height of the chariot is not that good but it will add more source to your test references.
Chariot_REboned walk animation
So the thing is to change the heaters and footer from the elephant to the horses? or from the horses to the elephant?, also this chariot use the horse skeleton with the extra bone for chariot.
And as for the 2h axe i did add teh launching attribute in edu but not luck, also i tested with the war_cry ability and add impetuous to the training level, and yet nothing.
I will pm you the animation if you don´t mind have a look at it.

[Bwian]

I wish I could post a video of what I have just been watching

Chariots rolling their wheels over the plains of M2TW. I have only done the rotations for the walk and run animations so far, but the others are just a matter of maths and text editing. I have a little spreadsheet doing that for me, so all I need to do is enter the number of frames the wheels need to complete a full turn and then paste in the numbers. Once I finish the rotations, I can doctor the headers and add the extra riders. Here's a quick picture or two to show how it looks static:





The final tweaks for the rider position can then be done when I have completed the other more important tasks. But...the main thing is ..IT ALL WORKED I now have a working chariot.

[Icedie El Guaraní]

So is that chariot using the normal horse with the tweak in the finger numbers , and the heater and footer of the elephant?
Look great mate, really !!

[Krieg_Boy]

Im having problems running this magnificent tool.. I have last python version, and cant run the GameObjectApplication

[SigniferOne]

Wooo Bwian! That looks so finished!

[King Kong]

@KE
Thanks again for all your help to make the new ballistas work! I was glad that I could help at least a little bit with noting a little bug.


@Bwian
Wow, I never thought someone would really manage to make chariots, but you have proved the opposite! Just awesome!
And finally I could try your tutorial to make an "elephant troll" (with new animations for the mace weapon) and after a lot of lost nerves it finally worked!! Thanks for the great tutorial!
The only problem I see is that elephants use so few animations... Do you maybe know if it's possible to add some more animations (for example more attacks) to elephants or is this hardcoded? Or may it be somehow possible to use a normal unit's set of animations?

[Nakharar]

coooooooool

[Bwian]

Nearly done with the animations, so this should be ready for an alpha release DEFINITELY for Christmas

Those wishing to use it will need to be running with the unpacked folders and Caliban's released animations, and be able to run this in a mod folder to regenerate the files. As such, it is not really for the beginner, but more a base for the experienced mod teams to use. expand and improve on. It makes the things possible and gives a framework for people to build on.

As an extra plus, working with KnightErrant on this has helped to hone the tools and cleared out a few issues in GOAT to make things so much easier for those who want to play more with this stuff.

@KingKong.... yes, the elephant thing does impose somee limitations. I am going to experiment further to see what can be ironed out of the process...so it may be possible to do more. If not, this sort of thing is really for a few high impact creatures, so a lack of variation is not too much of an issue. From what I recall in the RTW animations, I noted a correlation between certain 'moves' and animations...where the moves seemed to be hardcoded and linked to the animations in descr_skeleton. If you did not have a certain move in the list, you got a crash. I think this may be hard-wired to the creature type. Still....there may be ways to get around this. Never know until you try! I don;t know what it would do if you put in more than 1 entry for the attack... it might use both. As with all this stuff.... it's a question of having a crazy idea and trying it. The tools are there, and this game engine is a GREAT sandbox. I'll still be messing about with this long after Empires comes out.

[Bwian]

@Krieg Boy ... I just noticed your post. If you have the last version of Python ( version 3 ) it's not compatable with previous versions. Version 2.51 should work fine, or you could try the conversion tool on Python's website to convert the scripts to version 3.

The tools were written with the version 2.XX series.

[Ataegina]

chariots look cool

[Banzai!]

So how do you convert an ms3d with custom bones to a mesh?

Here is a guy with the extra sling bone:



I fear something has been lost in translation....

[Icedie El Guaraní]

You have to zeroed joint first before doing any further changes, i believe that is what causing your animation to cripple. and what the heck is that huge peace in the middle?????? one thing is sure , you have created an abomination, lol!!

[Bwian]

The classic 'crucifiction' pose in the first picture also points towards an error with the setup. Alatuns 'Tome of Knowledge' has some good pointers to cure that. As far as other odd effects go, zero all the bones ( working in MS3D this is simple. Go to tools and click zero rotations ) or there will be issues with the animations. They are calculated on the assumption that your base-pose is the reference.

As far as the odd effects go, they do not look as though they are related to your extra bone. One good check is to animerge the MS3D file with the animation. If the MS3D is OK and hte animations are fine, you will get that OK. Then you know it's the way it has converted to MESH. You will also be able to see how the skeleotn is moveing compared to the mesh. This will show a lot of issues too.

[Spartos]

I have a question concerning vertex weighting using 3ds Max. I use a Skin modifier to weight vertices but when I use KE's Import/Exporter to MS3D and then put the unit in the game, the weights are all messed up and I get floating swords, skewed heads etc. I open the exported MS3D file again to check what went wrong and I see that the bone weights are not the ones I assigned in the first place. The most common problem is everything reverting to bone_pelvis. While the main bodies all have proper weights (and anything I import using the Import Geometry Only option are also fine) anything I model myself (swords, capes etc.) and then try to weight to the skeleton is somehow being changed when I export to MS3D. Does anyone else use 3ds Max for modelling who could help me out here?