Working default soldier animations in 4.0.3?

[Code_Man]

 

Has anyone managed to get the default soldier to work animated in 4.0.3?

I tried and assetized each anim and added as dependency for the soldier model.

This includes lurker and and ryder anims plus fps arms so im sure its all in there and i can open them in the shape editor.

The model works fine with dependencies, but i have no idea if anims even get loaded.

Since the shape editor is sort of broken its even harder to tell if anything happens.

I have little to no understanding in regard to animations, any information would be appreciated.

There are many more character models i have too anything in regard to animations would be useful.

 

 

[Duion]

From my experience I can just tell you do yourself a favor and throw away the default soldier, it should have never been part of Torque3D, it was made to industry standards of the past and in 3dsmax which causes compatibility issues with open source software like blender. It took me two weeks of work to learn how to model, texture, animate and implement a player model and in the end I learned more and made more progress than dealing with the default soldier for months. I can give you my work files and tell you how its done if you want, if you have a real life and/or a job then I would probably calculate 2 months to get it done rather than 2 weeks, but depends on your skill level, a skilled artist probably can get a prototype done in a few days.

[Code_Man]

Good thing you say that, i guess there must be other ways to do things, but since i have little to no other examples im hard pressed for alternatives.

I rather keep the default one, since its the only one i know atleast used to work and is decent enough.

If you could link me some of your workfiles i would gloss over them for sure.

Sadly im no good gfx artist and barely manage the basics, just enough to coast trough, animation is my blindspot and until switching to 4.0.3 it was a nonissue.

I know things are not optimal but the default soldier and anims are very useful assets, shouldnt be this hard fix stuff.

[Duion]

It is still up on https://duion.com/files/system/paintballer_beta_10.zip

Its the whole blender setup and Torque3D setup, so this exports right into Torque3D, if you look at the right there is a grey window you can expand and I wrote down at what keyframes what animation plays, you enter those in Torque3D shape editor. You can also download Uebergame to see it fully implemented.

It uses a makehuman skelleton so you should download that tool as well since you can export a fully rigged player character from there to work with, so no need to model anything, but expect some ugly glitches, one of the hardest parts was to turn the whole player model including skelleton to the positive Y axis which is what Torque3D needs without messing anything up.

You need to watch tutorials for blender to do anything, just do not mess up the settings and finish one part after the other.

And forget the soldier you do not learn anything using that.

[Code_Man]

Wow thank you very much those work nicely.

Can you share me the script, mine play all the anims on idle and i dont want to muddy the waters with hax.

On the topic of animations, i really need working fps ones, just for reference to atleast hold the weapons in place, dunno if it it would be a big one to ask of you.

I have the lurker and ryder and etc models, but no clue how to fix anims, it just looks buttugly if the gun is right in your face.

[Duion]

Download Uebergame it is implemented there with all the scripts, or pull the text field in blender from the right open I marked at which frame what animation plays for the most part, enter that in shape editor.

Animations sound more complicated than they actually are, some animations are just a few frames long, the most complex animation is the walk cycle and the reload animation, look in the animation editor it creates an entry point for each time a bone has changed and inbetween the engine just interpolates from one state to the other, for example I made a mistake for the up and down look animation it should be interpolated using a linear algorithm, I used something else since it was default in blender.

Also read the Torque3D documentation about it and I also have the ultimate guide to Torque3D still uploaded the author allowed to share it for free, I bought it back in the day: http://duion.com/files/system/UGT3D.zip

The most complicated part of player characters is deciding for a setup and way to do it, then you can extend, for example you should use the same skelleton and bone names otherwise you have to rename them every time or create a setup to copy animations over and with a different model they may not work well at all etc. So I created a default character in makehuman and kept the bones and modeled around it.

One thing I still wanted to try and never got to it was exporting the individual animations as single files as it was done in the default template, I think you delete the meshes for that and just export the bones with the one animation and then point to that file in script for the animation.

As said I would throw away the default soldier and weapon models, they are broken and the way they are done is too complicated for a beginner, it has separate models and animations for first person and third person and then each animation is done again for each movement pose like walk, run, sprint, duck, swim etc and thats a hell lot of work, I simplified it a lot by just having one model and one set of animations for all, so you could just place any weapon into the hands of the player and it will look somewhat right but the details will of course not match, as an indie developer you need to scale down your project in terms of effort needed.

[fLUnKnhaXYU]

I was graciously gifted these at some earlier date . Its like 4.xx template stuff . If you're new to 4.xx these will help . they are located here at torque3d org forums .

very helpful modules

Edited February 23 by fLUnKnhaXYU
unfinished

[Duion]

@fLUnKnhaXYU That is just the old content that was removed in the new version and is now added back, but its still the default soldier, that should have been removed like a decade ago, I remember when I was in the steering committee we were working on replacing all the assets, but then new people took over and threw it all away.

[fLUnKnhaXYU]

thank you Duion , I was hoping that the scripts/datablock examples might be helpful , a couple of minor differences that are essential are seen in those examples . do hope you have a nice day . new assets would be kwel though

[Duion]

Porting my game to Torque4 is too much work for me alone and I also have other things to do now. I should have left the player character more defaultish for reusability, but I had so much problems with the head and face that I chose to just put a helmet on him and let it that way.

[fLUnKnhaXYU]

Well , dang , not having enough time is certainly a detriment . I feel that you'd have little trouble sorting out the syntax to suit the your needs within your scripts . I think its mostly replacing addresses with the correct asset names . but I really don't know what encounters you may endure with a full working administrate-able game , with update functionality . good luck with your other things too , noticed that you've been appearing less .

[Code_Man]

On 2/25/2024 at 1:14 PM, Duion said:

Porting my game to Torque4 is too much work for me alone and I also have other things to do now. I should have left the player character more defaultish for reusability, but I had so much problems with the head and face that I chose to just put a helmet on him and let it that way.

I know first hand what a timesink and drag this is, i did most of the porting by hand to have more control, but im sure you could automate it.

That being said there are quite a few advantages in 4.0 that made it quite worthwhile for me, you could try making a prototype as base to see how it goes.

On 2/23/2024 at 5:09 AM, fLUnKnhaXYU said:

I was graciously gifted these at some earlier date . Its like 4.xx template stuff . If you're new to 4.xx these will help . they are located here at torque3d org forums .

very helpful modules

Thank you, but sadly no dice on my end, i just cant seem to get things to work and i have no idea why, can anyone confirm that these work at all.

But atleast duions paintballer provides a great template and reference, im sure il make progress eventually.

What is really frustrating is i dont have working fps anims either, that makes it hard to rig the guns ingame properly and these seem to be simple.

[fLUnKnhaXYU]

this shows crouching , walking backwards , aiming down , firing , freelook , the message shows that a clip has been picked up , the weapon hud is showing . Is this what your are looking for ? the default keybinds are very incomplete if I'm not mistaken and cycling through the weapons with the keys might not be available . I used TS command #####.mountimage(lurkerWeaponImage, 0, 1) the ##### thing being the player ID .

 

this is what i have in the data folder , mostly the folders that are in the useful items link , and I removed the exampleModule , I think there were colliding circles involving duplicate functions . There were issues such as reload and idle animations not showing in third person IDK why .  hope this helps .

 

Edited March 3 by fLUnKnhaXYU
accidental submission

[Duion]

@Code_Man

Wenn I did simplify the whole process a lot with the paintball player, he has only one weapon and one model for first and third person, the default setup assumes you make a first person and a third person model and animation for each weapon, but this was too much work for me.

Advantages of using the same model in first person are its much more realistic as you have legs etc and your eyes follow what is happening for example when you call down you can see it actually happening from first person, I even made a breathing animation so if you pay close attention in first person you can see the character breathing as the view moves slightly up and down, downside I found so far is that the head may get in the way and iron sights animation will be problematic to line up perfectly also I have no idea yet how to make animations for different weapons. I animated the character in blender with the weapon in hand, then removed the weapon and then its added back in through the engine, but it looks stupid when the weapon is missing. So ideally you create a dummy melee "weapon" and then add a set of animations for rifles, one set for pistols etc since as an indie you do not have time to animate each weapon.

Just look up the manual how things meant to be and then improvise, I also did that, the hardest thing in development is to decide how you develop it, since there are many approaches to the same problem. First you should make a player character in like makehuman and get it imported into Torque3D, then you give him an idle and run cycle animation and this already fits most situations, the run cycle is already one of the hardest possible animations since most others consist of just a few frames.

[Code_Man]

Good thing you mention this duion, i havent considered this perspective.

Personally i prefer having all pieces as single files and gluing them together programmistically, since i rather reuse single stuff and less data in the files means less potential breakage.

I rather have a single file for each model and anim and edit those without having to touch any other data, but thats just my prefed approach, i can totally see how different needs have other solutions.

 

Im still having a real hard time getting the 1st and 3rd person anims to work, i checked the files and they are the same, i probably missed something real stupid, il keep trying it will work eventually.
It looks like most here are still learning those things themselfs, we will see where this leads to, im sure there are many cases and solutions that can be found yet.

Edited March 12 by Code_Man

[Duion]

Forget 1st and 3rd person animations, it is too complicated and too stupid, it is from a time where the gun was glued into the screen and then people pretended it was first person while it was totally not. https://arambartholl.com/de/first-person-shooter/

Only possible problems I have noticed from not having dedicated 1st person animations is the head maybe getting in the way, the camera clipping into the body and not being able to perfectly align iron sights animations, but to solve that you could copy the 3rd person model and modify it like remove the head for example.

You need to think for yourself and innovate a bit since there is no perfect way to do it, it depends on your project and how much work you are willing to do.

[Code_Man]

Just got to read that link, good one that gave me quite the laugh.

I just noticed your github repo is gone, i dont know if you ditched it or it ditched you, but im i need of the script file for the paintballer.

Dont feel like downloading ubergame for one file, i already downloaded sources for your model assets some time ago but dont have them on this machine.

 

Also you might be quite right about the being innovative part, i dont know either for now i want to go with least amount of work no matter how crappy it looks.

Being able to use 3rd person models in 1st person out of the box is a definite upside but as you said there is no perfect way and i dont know where things will go.

Nor have i been able to figure out why 1st person animations dont work, from the github repo, there is no appearent big magic there.

 

[Duion]

I deleted Github because it was broken since Microsoft bought it as well as some other stupid changes I did not like. Just download the game file, why even bother, you can also see it in action, which is also important otherwise you will have no idea what to do with those files if it does not work right away.

Torque handles animations well though, the only difficult thing is to split the animations up into the different movement states while scenery objects just have an on/off switch for the ambient animation, if you import a playermodel as scenery object all the animations will just play in a loop after each other, the real problem you are dealing with is learning how to make 3D models with animations.

If you are not making an open source game you can also just buy assets, the main reason I did everything from scratch was that my game was supposed to be fully open source and bought assets license are usually not compatible with that. But if your bought assets are not as you need, your problem starts from scratch as you have to fix it yourself.

 

[Code_Man]

Buying is not an option for me and github was never a thing for me.

I have found the issue, were some missing lines in the scripts for the animation data, i copied those over from the repo and it works now.

there is still a weird issue of setImageAnimPrefix not being found, i have the vague recollection of someone else mentioning this.

Im still happy i have working running and idle anims atleast, it looks so much less bad with even some animations.

I think someone should look into player landing without an animation causing a crash, that shouldnt happen for lack of an anim.

 

I decided i will go down the route of doing as much as possible programistically and see where this takes me, it may not be easy or optimal but i want to see how far one could take things.

Thank you again for your model, it will prove very helpful in the future, im sure.

Edited April 9 by Code_Man
landing not falling

[Duion]

As I said there are not that many animations needed, just run, idle, look up/down, it already covers most things, I did not use weapon animations I created the effect of firering the gun with smoke particles, light particles, sound effect and camera shake.

Most difficult thing is deciding on a way and standard how you will do things, because if that is thought through well you can re-use a lot of stuff later like animations, but you can also retarget bones in blender to convert animations, but it is an extra step to work through.

[Azaezel]

On 4/9/2024 at 12:58 PM, Code_Man said:

I have found the issue, were some missing lines in the scripts for the animation data, i copied those over from the repo and it works now.

there is still a weird issue of setImageAnimPrefix not being found, i have the vague recollection of someone else mentioning this.

 

that would be a two fold answer:
https://github.com/Torque3DResources/FPSEquipment/blob/main/datablocks/weapons/Lurker.tscript#L287-L288
rifle refers to the generic player pose https://github.com/Torque3DResources/FPSPlayer/blob/main/shapes/Soldier/soldier.tscript#L38-L60
that other players see

lurker would be the new utility method that takes a specific shapebaseimage and bolts the animation onto the player https://github.com/Torque3DResources/FPSEquipment/blob/main/shapes/weapons/Lurker/FP_Lurker.tscript#L57-L65
for first person viewing (you can of course still just use direct embedding in the player model configuration, but we figured this would scale better as folks add new wearables)

On 4/9/2024 at 12:58 PM, Code_Man said:

I think someone should look into player landing without an animation causing a crash, that shouldnt happen for lack of an anim.

Been fixed in head.