GenericArms and Soldier compatible with stock animations

[Jason Campbell]

Created a new set of arms and a generic soldier character. It is not game ready but the blend files are included. It may be a good starting point for someone. I did this to practice weighting in Blender but I think I am just as bad now as when I started. Heh.

 

I included the already posed MakeHuman "game engine" rig. You can import your mhx2 file into Blender, then open another instance of Blender with the included posed make human character. Then select all the bones in pose mode and copy then paste them into your MakeHuman rig. If anyone is interested I can go into more detail, if not you can just mess around with some new arms and a character.

 

Download Source Files and a folder you can drop in:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qvS0XIBpdpfVBJoVvdR71yxAX32UDaJu

 

Download Single Texture Version: Place these in game/shapes/actors/genericSoldier folder

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1OWAYsrbDth-YjC5DcUxEwApLrGMW0cye

 

Download: Single Texture Blend

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1l7IZFM1eMmjkZvqFxwFCmEy1s4mDBGcI

 

 

Crappy Video:

 

And just an example of a makehuman I copied the pose and transferred my weights over and got this result in a few minutes of fixing some weighting in the legs.

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Edited October 1, 2023 by Jason Campbell

[XIXWYRMEXIX]

Very cool Jason. Believe it or not these past couple tutorials/examples have helped me a great deal. If nothing else as I have said before, considering I have found nothing about things like this, and considering how a lot of older tutorials and resources are starting to disappear, I think they are great. As you learn and others learn we can perhaps add to them.

[Duion]

I know people will call me negative again, but I would not bother recycling any of the default Soldier assets and rather start making new animations etc. While at first things look good, in detail you can see that everything looks a bit weird still and some weights are wrong.

You should not adapt your workflow to someone elses assets, just to be able to recycle some animations.

You are not that far away from making a fully functioning character all by yourself, all you need to do now is to spend a few days learning to animate.

I could also send you my paintball player, he is compatible with makehuman default rig, you only have to figure out how to re-use and/or export animations only.

[Jason Campbell]

Very cool Jason. Believe it or not these past couple tutorials/examples have helped me a great deal. If nothing else as I have said before, considering I have found nothing about things like this, and considering how a lot of older tutorials and resources are starting to disappear, I think they are great. As you learn and others learn we can perhaps add to them.

 

Great I'm glad that it is of some use. I'm always learning and this was a good exercise for me. The Arms are almost there and I may come back to them. I may check to see if making a custom gun for the Arms is possible in Blender. I made the shotgun in 3D Max and it was fairly easy. I think Blender's FBX import has improved over the years because importing the Soldier source and exporting it to T3D didn't used to work now it does. I am now using Linux exclusively so Blender is now my go to. The funny thing is I tried out Blender 2.80 and it is very nice but is a completely different beast. I will eventually have to migrate to that because it is much better, IMO but for now I am using 2.79b.

@Duion

I already knew that you would disagree with this but I really did it for me and maybe a few others. For me it was a proof of concept and honestly with the arms, it is very close and I don't think that that is a waste of time(I will most likely revisit that). Thank you for the paintball player to check out.

[Duion]

The main use of what you did will most likely be to port over animations to your character in the future, I tried that as well, but could not figure it out or was too lazy to rename and re-target all the bones and read all those tutorials, so for me it was less time consuming to just make my own animations instead of porting others over. Especially since the only ones compatible were those that came with the Torque3D demos anyway, all other animations may require adjustments. For example if you port over a motion capture walk animation, you have to make it seamless, meaning it has to be made symmetrical and looping and it has to fit exactly frame by frame, everything else will likely look wonky. Basically most FPS animations only consist of a few frames, that get interpolated between. Even my run animation is 22 frames, which roughly half are actual keyframes.

Well it is not all a waste of time, to learn how to do those things is fine, the problem is you did it the wrong way, you made your character compatible with the demo character from Torque and its animations, but you should have rather made the demo animations compatible with your character, but this may be problematic, since of import issues that may occur, so I understand why you did it the other way around.

I still would vote for removing the demo characters and force people to learn things from scratch, it will help people more in the long run. The demo characters are too complex to start learning with and missing source files and/or are only compatible with 3dsmax which only few people have.

[Jason Campbell]

What you are saying make sense but I still think it will be useful. Especially if you are doing characters with armor or robot characters and the stock animations are all you need.

For instance, in like 15 mins I got this result with a bit of posing of an old Maximo character I had lying around and transfer of weights and a bit of weighting.

GDwOX5ifhqU

I don't know, looks pretty decent already.

[XIXWYRMEXIX]

I know people will call me negative again, but I would not bother recycling any of the default Soldier assets and rather start making new animations etc. While at first things look good, in detail you can see that everything looks a bit weird still and some weights are wrong.

You should not adapt your workflow to someone elses assets, just to be able to recycle some animations.

You are not that far away from making a fully functioning character all by yourself, all you need to do now is to spend a few days learning to animate.

I could also send you my paintball player, he is compatible with makehuman default rig, you only have to figure out how to re-use and/or export animations only.

 

That is not negative Duion. Coming in and saying something is crap with no tact, no information on how to improve, and no discussion is negative. Having an opinion, then explaining it and why you think that way is not negative, it is discussion, which is always good. There is a large difference between the two.

Reusing animations is not a bad thing in my opinion. For quite a number of reasons. Time constraints on solo developers being one of them. So I think this is not a bad idea in general. It can also be used for learning, for reusing a rig and animations a person has done themselves, etc. Lots of reasons to do this, learn it, and make it better.

That said of course it is probably better to make all your own things from scratch.

@Jason Campbell Yes I think it is very useful. LOL I remember your shotgun, I played with it, at the time it crashed my version of torque for some reason but I did think it was cool (I have the soldier weapons pack so I already "had" a shotgun, but thought it was still very cool.). I moved to 2.8 (which I LOVE, I hate the old interface) so I could do the original rig transfer tutorial but found out the import is still not fully updated so I will do it with 2.79 now. Yes I knew/know your on a Linux rig, I prefer blender anyway personally.

@Duion I still think this has a lot of applications for a lot of people, some people have no time to become good 3d modelers, some people have no ability, some a combination of the two. Personally I do not care how something is achieved as long as it is achieved with decent/good results. Different methodologies are all relevant as long as the end result is decent. It is of course always better for someone to do things "properly" and learn right from the get go. I do believe that's the best practice.

@Jason Campbell I like the way that looks and has turned out. I will do some playing around myself soon. I recently got a new computer and am still reinstalling my tools and sifting through my old files and resetting up my rig.

[Duion]

@ Jason Campbell

Yes, looks genius at first, but when you want to replace the weapons as well, you can throw away the animations or you need to build your weapons the same way the default Torque weapons are build. The best way may be to edit the animations and not edit everything else to match the animations.

It is often so that if you try shortcuts and save yourself work, life invents ways to punish you. I had this happen to me many times now, where I thought "oh just reuse this or that, it will save you work" and in the end it turned out worse than if I had done all by myself the hard way. It depends what your end goal is, for prototypes it may be okay, but in the long run you may want to have better quality.

[Jason Campbell]

Added a single texture version to the OP.