Creating new facial animations

[Alvar007 130]

@Salk 1) Maybe it's because the video lags, but the time he has his neck tilted is not that long. I still reduced it a little bit.

2) I don't see the second winking you are mentioning, perhaps you are referring to the blinking he does after the wink. I removed it anyway.

3) I noticed that, although I didn't have any problems in the program. I still managed to fix it.

Test it yourself in the game and see if it's any better.

On 5/8/2020 at 5:47 AM, Salk said:

By the way, I already have S_Male02.mdl and S_Male02.mdx in my override due to several enhancements/tweaks made in the past so once the FLIRT animation is final could I upload my current version here so that you can add to it so that I can preserve all content?

Sure, that way people can have all the fixes in one file too. I will attach the female version once you send me the files for the complete download.

custom flirt animation fixed.zip

[Salk 368]

Hello, @Alvar007!

Thanks for taking time to update your new FLIRT animation. I did test it on my local install and I can show you what it looks like in this video here. Forgive the rather low resolution.

In the video above I set the FLIRT animation for the lines "Well, of course, darling. Whatever Tanis Venn can do. You know, very few human females come to Tatooine..." and "Sure you do. Tanis can tell you all about the thrill of the hunt, man versus beast. It's all very exciting."

As you can see there is a problem that I am also having with the drinking animation which is the cycling of the animation itself. 

I don't know anything about how the game plays animations and how/when they reset them but ideally the FLIRT animation should always start with the winking so that if the dialogue line is short, there is still a good chance that the player sees it. For that reason it is also important that it is 2-3 seconds long. In the video the new animation you created doesn't almost ever start at the beginning but comes after some time. Many times the game doesn't even manage to play it because the spoken line ends.

Another problem is that it seems there is no actual winking (see from minute 1:16 to 1:21).

I have uploaded my files here.

Thanks again for all your hard work.

S_Male02.mdl S_Male02.mdx

[Alvar007 130]

@Salk Hello again, Salk.

I've noticed the problem you are mentioning and I thought the game did that with every looping animation, but turns out it only does it with my custom animations. The vanilla ones work fine, even if they are compiled again with MDLEdit following the same proccess my custom ones do. I have no idea what's going on. How can a block of text that looks the same as the other ones not work while the other ones do? I have tried everything at this point and I just can't figure it out. I had the same problem with my custom animation for my Force Power, that's why I had to change the animation to fireforget instead of looping which is the only workaround I have found unfortunately.

So yeah tell me if you're still interested and if I should upload the rest of the files. Also, if anyone knows what's going on please let me know.

[Salk 368]

Hello, @Alvar007!

Before wasting more of your time it'd be very important if the problem with the animation cycle could be resolved because, as it stands, it's quite a big issue. Perhaps @DarthParametric or @JCarter426 can shed some light about why this happens and if there is anything that can be done to fix it. I personally have no idea why that happens and it's a complete mystery to me.

Would it be possible to use the same workaround you used for your new Force Power? Could you turn the FLIRT animation into a fire and forget one?

Cheers! 

[Alvar007 130]

Well, since apparently nobody knows about this issue I'm just gonna drop the files you asked for @Salk, including the female version.

About the missing winking, it works for me. If you notice the model of Tannis doesn't wink once in all the animations he does, must be something wrong with his model or your game.

On 5/13/2020 at 7:02 AM, Salk said:

Would it be possible to use the same workaround you used for your new Force Power? Could you turn the FLIRT animation into a fire and forget one?

It certainly is, but the vanilla DLGs will stop working when the animation is called from them. It would have to be called via script, luckily you were already modifying them to your liking so hopefully it's not too much of a problem. I've included a modified animations.2da as well where the animation is changed from looping to fireforget.

custom merged animations.rar custom female flirt animation.rar animations.2da

[Salk 368]

Hello again, @Alvar007!

Thanks for all the work you have been doing specifically for me. It must have taken much time and effort and I am very grateful. I will test everything carefully as soon as I am done with trying to fix a problem with the Rulan mission in Kashyyyk which is quite broken (that comes from my attempt to manually merge some K1R assets/changes into my own project).

I know you will now move on to work on your machinimas and I will not bother you further but perhaps I can still contact you in case something is wrong with my testing?

Thanks again!

[Alvar007 130]

On 5/19/2020 at 8:48 AM, Salk said:

I know you will now move on to work on your machinimas and I will not bother you further but perhaps I can still contact you in case something is wrong with my testing?

Yes of course! I tested the animations before and they should work fine.

I was now testing calling the animation via script with the fireforget option and it works, but when calling it in another node when the animation hasn't finished playing makes it reset to the default one (PAUSE1). So keep that in mind, it's better to just call it in nodes that are not too close to each other or just wait until it ends.

[Salk 368]

Hello, @Alvar007!

I had finally time to test the new FLIRT animation (only the Male one) and I fear there are some issues with it. On the positive note instead, I switched your WELD (a.k.a. DRINKING) animation from looping to fireandforget and now it does cycle correctly.

About the FLIRT animation instead, I notice some corruption of the eyes/eyebrows animations which were present even in the former test of which I made a video before (unfortunately it doesn't show so well due to the low resolution). This corruption extends also to the texture (or is it just a shadow issue?) of the DRUNK animation I play in a dialogue after playing the FLIRT animation first. I should do more testing in order to understand whether this corruption of the eyes textures/animation happens only after playing the FLIRT animation first.

I can of course make a new video, if needed.

Sorry about all the problems with this, Alvar007. I understand if you don't want to put any more of your time in making this right.

Cheers!

UPDATE: The corruption I was talking about seems to be that the NPC no longer properly plays the blink animation.

[Alvar007 130]

@Salk I don't know what to tell you. The NPC I tried the animation on works fine. Maybe it's a problem with that particular NPC or something else in your override folder.

[Salk 368]

@Alvar007Oh so this problem may only be happening to me? Interesting... I will then try to test the new models on a clean installation and see if the issues are gone and return with confirmation.

It would be nice if anyone else could also provide some feedback as well.

Cheers!

UPDATE: Well, I have reinstalled the game and used one old saved game (hopefully it doesn't invalidate the test) and the S_Male02 model provided above to check if the FLIRT animation still has the same problem with the missing blinking and it does. So at this point I really don't know what to do other than wait for other people to test the new animation and report one way or the other.

Edited May 29, 2020 by Salk
Added info

[Alvar007 130]

Alright, so I finally got around to finishing my Force Power mod and it's now pending approval. I had to select TSL Mods for the category since there isn't one for both games, perhaps a moderator can change it to that or create a new one.

Also, @Salk I noticed the eyebrows corruption problem you mentioned when I changed the NPC model with Tanis. It seems it's most noticeable in this model than the one I was trying it on. The eyelids/shading texture you also refer to only happens in this model (that I've tried so far), the other one didn't have this problem, only the eyebrows one that wasn't as noticeable as this. It has to be some compiling issue or something as I definitely don't see that in 3DS Max, probably the same source as the one causing the animation to not loop correctly. I can try and remove the keys for those bones completely if you want but then they wouldn't animate at all during the animation.

[Salk 368]

@Alvar007 I do appreciate the offer and the effort but at this point I wonder if it'd be fair of me to ask you to work any further on the FLIRT animation. Removing animation key for those specific bones would affect only that particular animation? If that is the case, we may go that way but I don't want to rush you on this and allow you to work instead on your own material.

Looking forward to see the new Force Power animation at work in its final stage.

Cheers!

[Alvar007 130]

Ok so I have removed the eyebrows keys but also the eyelids position keys that were the cause of the glitching shading issue. I have included the new animation with the changes you made previously so it's all merged there.

On top of that, while I was testing this out with Tanis model I noticed that his eyes weren't moving, and I realised that his eyes nodes were called eyeR and eyeL instead of eyeRA and eyeLA which is what the game expects because they are called like that in the supermodels and the rest of the models. So I have renamed them and now it looks so much better. There are actually two files of the same model head (I don't know why, the only things that changes it's the texture but whatever) and both of them had the eye nodes wrong. So I included them as well here in case anyone else wants the fix. I don't know if there are any more models with the wrong names, I haven't checked them all. The one Tanis uses is N_TatComA_M, I discovered the other one because I previously thought that was the one for Tanis but it's just the regular asian head.

Btw I was testing this with the vanilla Tanis model but I see in your video that you have him modded, so I don't know if this is gonna work but it should.

various fixes.rar

[DarthParametric 3,777]

7 hours ago, Alvar007 said:

I don't know if there are any more models with the wrong names

There are a few. Some should already be fixed as part of K1CP.

[Salk 368]

Hello @Alvar007!

Thank you so much for all the help here. I was going to download and test everything again but I noticed I already have in my Override the comm_a_m.mdl/mdx files. They might be from the K1 CP but I cannot be 100% so would you mind making a comparison with your own files and check if the ones I have attached here have something different?

And yes, I have changed the appearance of Tanis to make it unique. I like to try and inject more variation into the game when and if I can.

Cheers! 

comm_a_m.7z

[Alvar007 130]

Yeah they seem to be fixed at least the part I checked. If they are from K1 CP they probably did a better job than me so you can keep those in your override folder if you want.

[Salk 368]

Okay, thanks @Alvar007!

I need to yet bother you with another couple of files though: I do have s_female03.mdl and s_female03.mdx in my override as well (there are over 4000 files there...) and their size is considerably bigger so I was wondering if you could integrate your changes into my custom files just like you did for s_male02.mdl and s_male02.mdx. I suspect they have to do with JC's Jedi Robe modification.

After that, I can properly test the flirting animation for both male and female NPCs.

Cheers!

s_female03.7z

UPDATE: I have just tested the FLIRT male animation with Tanis and I am very glad to say all glitches I reported are fixed! Wonderful job there, thanks!

Said that, I realize that we need the FLIRT animation to be FIre and Forget to work properly because of the cycling issue we never managed to resolve. This works fine but the problem is that the Fire and Forget animation plays the animation cycle for its whole length so we need to cut it much shorter than it currently is and try to make it end so that it can transition smoothly into the TALK_NORMAL one. If the transition is not into TALK_NORMAL by default then I can try and see if calling it from script at the appropriate time (when the FLIRT has just finished) may work.

Additionally, the desirable speed for the FLIRT animation would be the one I am showing in the second video, namely twice as fast. I don't know if it is possible for you to do it? I have used 2.0 to speed it up for comparison but of course that speeds up the lips synch too and that's not good.

I have uploaded the two videos so that you can see the current situation:

Tanis FLIRT

Tanis FLIRT (2x speed)

[Alvar007 130]

I am not sure what the problem is. Judging by the videos you posted, you want to make the animation stop when the dialog stops and go to the next conversation node instead of waiting for it to finish? In that case, since you are already altering the dialogs, you should be able to put a delay in seconds in the "delay" field for that node. I think that's a much better solution than making it faster because it doesn't look too good.

Also, I have attached the female files. They should work without issue.

s_female03.rar

[Salk 368]

Hello, @Alvar007!

Thanks for the female files. I'll test them very soon.

About the problem with the animation: the problem is that the dialogue doesn't advance until the FLIRT animation's cycle is fully played. It does look quite bad and it cannot even be skipped by left-clicking. You can see it easily from the video called Tanis FLIRT above. 

I doubt changing the value of the DELAY field is going to help anything but I can test with some values there of course. 

I thought it was possible to make the FLIRT animation you created much shorter (not faster, which looks bad like you said) by ending it a second or two after the NPC winked so that the total duration of the animation cycle changes from the current 25 seconds to 12 seconds. You can also notice that the FLIRT animation ends with a half attempt of a smile that looks out of place.

This is the only problem that is left and I hope it can be resolved so that we can call this over.

Cheers! 

[DarthParametric 3,777]

Pop in a script with a delayed ClearAllActions on the NPC.

[Salk 368]

Thanks for the suggestion but it wasn't actually needed.

I realized only later that the delay was due to my ActionConversation() and a delayed ActionResumeConversation so that is no longer an issue. 

I seem to have another kind of problem though. The new animation will be played only once when I start the dialogue. The successive nodes that contain the same following script won't start the FLIRT animation again and I don't know why. It will work again and only once after I finished the dialogue and restart it.

void main() {
    PlayAnimation(ANIMATION_LOOPING_FLIRT, 1.0);
}

Additionally, after I have changed in animations.2da the FLIRT animation to FireAndForget, the animation won't start if I use the DLG Editor (as opposed to the above script) to trigger it.

Any ideas?

Cheers!

[DarthParametric 3,777]

Sounds you just need to stop screwing around and use a stunt animation.

[Salk 368]

4 hours ago, DarthParametric said:

Sounds you just need to stop screwing around and use a stunt animation.

Actually things now work fine except this one thing I can't figure out. 

[DarthParametric 3,777]

@Alvar007 if Salk hasn't completely sapped your will to live, I have an animation suggestion for you. The Gamorrean model lacks the animations for both throwing grenades and activating shields, yet there's at least one example of combat in K1 where both actions are guaranteed to occur (Vorn Daasraad during the Genoharadan quest). Not sure about how much piggie action there is in TSL, but Obsidian didn't add those anims to that version either.

[Alvar007 130]

I stepped away from my machinima for a bit to fulfill DP's request. It was easy peasy using the mapper function that KotorMax has, I just had to adjust some things and deal with some controller errors but this is what I got:

-Both throwing grenade animations:

-Using shields:

At first I tried naming them cthrowgren/cthrowgren1 or throwgren/throwgren1 but they didn't play so I had to do the same as Selkath and convert the model to an F type. Then I renamed the rest of the animations to their humanoid counterparts.

Let me know if they are any good and I'll submit them to the download section.