Alvar007

Creating new facial animations

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9 hours ago, Alvar007 said:

It was easy peasy using the mapper function that KotorMax has

Interesting. That accounts for the differences in rig scales presumably? I've only ever tried it with similarly proportioned rigs before. Looks good though - can't see any problems with it.

Edit: Having just tried importing the anims myself in Max, I spotted a problem that I can also see in your grenade tosssing GIF. The thumb on the right hand gets bent back to the wrist. Presumably that's an issue with reversed starting rotations or something, but whatever the cause that will presumably require some manual cleanup. The shield anim GIF is harder to see, but in Max the right thumb is also bent backwards in that anim.

9 hours ago, Alvar007 said:

I had to do the same as Selkath and convert the model to an F type

Yeah I suspected that would be the case. Probably the only thing to check would be the conversations/cutscenes with piggies involved. I know of two in K1 (both on Tatooine - the fake trapped woman ambush and Vorn Daasraad during the Genoharadan quest, as I mentioned above) and three in TSL (one on Citadel Station working for Luxa, two in the Exchange compound on Nar Shaddaa).

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22 hours ago, DarthParametric said:

Interesting. That accounts for the differences in rig scales presumably? I've only ever tried it with similarly proportioned rigs before.

Yeah that's what I used to fix Malak's animations, it is really useful. I also tried it with the Selkath but it creates a complete mess I don't know exactly why, perhaps I should try again renaming some of the bones since the last time I just did an auto remap without renaming anything.

22 hours ago, DarthParametric said:

Probably the only thing to check would be the conversations/cutscenes with piggies involved.

I just checked those and there is a problem with the thugs ambush if you fight them after talking: they are using melee sword combat animations that the piggy model doesn't have because their .utc have the gamorrean axe equipped but I renamed the animations to the melee unarmed counterparts since there are just not enough of them to cover the sword ones. So their .utc would have to be replaced to unequip the axe fixing as well the player reacting with parries and flashes like they had a sword or lightsaber. I also need to mention that all the READY animations the piggies have in convos are not playing because there is not a humanoid counterpart for it (that I know of, correct me if I'm wrong).

On top of this there is another problem with Vorn's lines playing the "tlknorm" animation which is supposed to be the default one when nothing is specified in the .dlg file. It just plays the PAUSE1 animation I'm not sure why, it doesn't happen in the conversation with the thugs so I'm a little lost here.

With all these little problems I don't know if this mod is worth it, but you let me know.

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1 hour ago, Alvar007 said:

I also need to mention that all the READY animations the piggies have in convos are not playing because there is not a humanoid counterpart for it (that I know of, correct me if I'm wrong).

There's not a single ready anim, there are multiple different ones to cover the different weapon types. You can use @JCarter426's combat animation guide and TSL's annotated animations.2da to help you find them, but they should be of the form gXrY, where X and Y are numbers that indicate wielding type and anim variation, respectively. For example, g2r1 should be the single saber/sword ready and g5r1 should be the single blaster pistol ready. Some of these appear to be recycled, for example g7r1 (rifle) and g9r1 (heavy carbine) are identical. If you are setting the piggy's anims as unarmed, then they'll presumably need a g8r1 for the ready anim. But since their UTCs force them to use melee anims, I'd just go with that. They obviously already have a limited set of anims by default, so duplicating the existing ones to cover the melee variations shouldn't be too much of a problem. The only question is whether the choreography limits the human anims when fighting a creature, or if it uses the full range of anims regardless. I'm not sure I ever noticed.

1 hour ago, Alvar007 said:

there is another problem with Vorn's lines playing the "tlknorm" animation which is supposed to be the default one when nothing is specified in the .dlg file. It just plays the PAUSE1 animation I'm not sure why, it doesn't happen in the conversation with the thugs so I'm a little lost here.

There's nothing special in the DLG that would suggest the cause. Neither it or the ambush one have any forced or scripted talk anims. I'm not sure why it would work in one scene and not the other.

1 hour ago, Alvar007 said:

I also tried it with the Selkath but it creates a complete mess I don't know exactly why, perhaps I should try again renaming some of the bones since the last time I just did an auto remap without renaming anything.

You can export and import a text list of the node mapping, so it might be worth doing it that way to see if that gives you some more control.

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Alright I covered all the melee animations (only related to the single saber ones since they are supposed to be using the axe) including attacks, parries and dodges but the choreography problem still exists since they have the axe equipped so I don't think there is nothing that can be done unless changing their .utc file. Also I mapped some other animations like "inject" (which is strangely used in the thugs dialogue) and some others like "runinj" and "pauseinj" that the piggies didn't have.

The Vorn issue is still there I'm not sure why, I tried changing his appearance (since he uses Alien_Gammorean_03 instead of 01) but it didn't work. I dropped the files here anyway, maybe you can figure it out.

gammorean anims.rar

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So after more than one year here I am posting again. I'm still working on my machinima but I wanted to show and release something for this new 2022.

@Liserg asked me once again to port Darth Sion to K1 so I did and I plan to release him just like I did with the other Sith Lords in the past. He even has his own unique walking animation!

jCwpfbK.png

I also recreated his iconic rage healing Force Power with a custom effect:

As for the Vorn issue I mentioned in the posts above, I managed to fix it. It seems I was looking into the wrong dialogue. Apparently tat18_vorn.dlg is the own conversation for that NPC but it's not the one it plays in the cutscene when you have to face him. tat18_vorndroid2.dlg is the one that plays instead. And if you notice there is a TALK_FORCEFUL animation set for Vorn in that one. So that explains why he wasn't playing the nomal talking one when I changed the modeltype but the thugs were (as they don't have anything specified). Apparently the engine sets the TALK_NORMAL animation by default when the S modeltype is set. But if you change it to F and specify another dialogue animation then it defaults to the PAUSE1 animation.

So I thought I would create one TALK_FORCEFUL animation for the piggies (I don't know if this is worth it, dunno if there are any other moments where they use it but whatever) and this is what I got:

If you think this is decent I can release a pack for the Gamorreans animations in the downloads section.

Hope you all have a fantastic New Year!

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Nice work again, Alvar007!
 

Glad to see you are still working on animations! I think the gamorrean animations are just great and I'd love to download and use them.

 

Happy 2022!

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So since you've turned up again @Alvar007, I had an idle thought while playing around with some TOR models that I figured I'd run past you. How practical do you think it would be to create a rig with added bones for flappy bits - for example capes, lekku, etc. - and then use a physics sim to generate motion for those bits over the top of the existing vanilla animations for the rest of the body, baking the generated solutions out to additional keyframes for the added flappy bits bones? Obviously it would require a lot of manual cleanup to get smooth looping and cross-anim transitions, but assuming it was feasible it seems like it could take out a decent chunk of the donkey work out of extending all the combat, etc. anims for models that aren't wholly catered to by the vanilla rigs.

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The 3 mods (Darth Sion port, his Force Power and the gamorrean anims pack) have been submitted and they are pending approval now.

@DarthParametric I assume by your post that the danglymeshes don't do the job? I have yet to experiment with a physics sim. Which one were you thinking of, MotionBuilder perhaps? I don't know if what you're asking is accomplishable but if I were to try that I would need to know the location of the flappy bits as I'm not too familiar with the TOR models. I assume the bones for the lekku wouldn't work for the lobes of the Selkath for example. So I would have to take every one into account.

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I was playing with Nautolans for the Jedi on the Star Forge mod and they have a lot of bad deformation during combat animations due to their lekku draping over the back. The skin weights are split between head, neck, upper torso, and torso, so during anims with a lot of differential twisting between head and torso they end up getting mangled. From past experience, the player in TSL getting up off the floor in Peragus is also another case that causes extremely bad deformation. In TOR, their lekku (also for Twi'leks) are primarily driven by physics, so they don't have those sorts of problem. But the general principle I was thinking about could also be applied to other similar objects. Capes, long hair, tails, etc.

Obviously Odyssey can't handle real-time physics, but I figured it might be possible to set up and run a physics sim inside something like Blender (Max? Unreal Engine?) and then bake that out to an actual animation. Some quick Googling suggested that the baking is feasible in Blender. So my idea was port a TOR model to the KOTOR rig, add in the extra physics bones it has from TOR, apply the standard supermodel anims to the Odyssey bones and let the physics sim generate appropriate movement for the lekku or cape or whatever. Then bake out everything to a new set of anims that combines both.

It wouldn't be a one size fits all obviously. You mentioned Selkath, those would require their own rig/physics setup, Nautolans would require their own, etc. So it wouldn't be something anyone would want to do more than once or twice I'm guessing. It was just something I was musing over as I was looking at some video of the fight cutscenes and cringing at the deformation, so I'm not expecting you or anyone else to undertake it. Mostly I was just wondering if the idea had any merit.

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@DarthParametric I gave it a try. I created my own set of bones and simulated them inside Blender with one of the combat animations. The result is okay inside the program but the bones have both rotation and translation to make the movement look like this. So if you parent them to the head for example you are combining the translations and you get weird results. One solution is to leave them unparented which breaks the rest of the animations but that wouldn't be a problem if someone was to bake them all. The manual cleanup to make smooth loop transitions for each animation is what makes this a pain in the ass. Not to mention is not as realistic because the bones need a few seconds to get back to the resting pose. Also I'm still using Blender 2.79 which uses the old plugin where you have one scene per animation so I would have to bake every single time for each animation. If I'm not mistaken in the new version of the plugin you can have all the keyframes in the timeline like Kotormax so that would be a solution. You can even test the results in Blender itself without having to go to the game or 3DSMax like I did here:

Spoiler

ezgif-6-12f329d81f.gif

The problem comes when apparently the mesh has verts with more than four weights and also some of them go over 1.0. So I corrected that automatically using MDLOps but unfortunately the movement I created breaks in game:

Spoiler

ezgif-3-b9c79f5684.gif

So in my opinion this is too much work for too little. I was thinking why not parent the whole lekku to the head so there isn't any deformation? (although there would probably be clipping). Or maybe set it as a danglymesh?

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If you only weight it to the head (as you would have to in a separate head model) then they will be completely rigid and clip through the body with even the slightest head movement. Danglymeshes will also clip.

I figured there wasn't much likelihood of a sim being practical, so that's fine. Thanks for giving it a shot though.

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