Sorry your browser is not supported!

hi i currently use milkshape 3d to animate my models.

but what i want to do is make an enemy and my player and make some animations of them interacting like fighting,grabbing u know struggling (sort of like when a zombie grabs onto the player.)

i cant do this with milkshape,the problem is rotating the enemy so it will face forward again.

any one have suggestions for a modeler/animator that can do this???
preferably one that isnt too expensive either. tks!

The professionals do this right inside the modelling/animation software, but they use very expensive software and have more direct control over animation than we get with DBPro.

Personally I'd most likely make my own animation system to handle this. I mean it's fairly easy to make a system that allows you to rotate bones in DBPro, and for an internal system that you don't intend to share it could be very cheap and cheerful. The maths knowledge needed to have interpolated rotations in keyframes is not that scary, but the main benefit is that you could use positioning as well as run of the mill keyframe animation. Like you might have the zombie and player animating in tandem, so you could have the zombie attack the player from different angles, have them wrestle in whatever way you want - then using position and orientation comparisons between the zombie and the player, decide what animation to play when the characters get close enough to each other.

The problem with milkshape is that you can't have animations that involve a character walking around easily, it's usually a case of animating characters as if they were skewered in the middle of the scene - with your own system you could have loops that are basically the same as that - but then also allow these loops to be used in conjunction with other animations, tracking position and orientation of whole characters as well as their bones.

It's not straightforward by any means I know, but this is really the best way I've thought of doing this, and I think about this stuff a lot. There's so much I'd like to do with a home grown animation system that I'll most likely give it a try before long, I'd like to open up avenues for decent fighting games and better character interaction. I think it must be a real tough problem, I mean I've never seen so much as a flicker of this being achieved in 3D in any hobbyist project. It's really something that is the domain of the pro's I think, would be something pretty special to get it working in DBPro.

Ohh, one thing I forgot to mention is that with your own animation system, you could save a lot of work and even get to add more characters easily. If you were animating with pure code, then all you would need from the characters is a standard pose, they'd have to share the same skeleton, but you could change the mesh and rig it up and export it with no animation. So firstly you could add lots of characters without the pain of animating them all.

The other factor is memory consumption, DirectX animated models can be quite memory hungry, and use 10 models all the same means your using 10 times the memory for animation. But if your animation data is all internal, the models are much smaller, animation data can bloat model files, and having a lot of models running around would quickly become a performance problem.

Just thought I'd bring up that added benefit, always worth stating the expected benefits in suggesting any large task.

milcshapes .x exporter converts to limb animation, and it lacks any constraints/shape keys/vertex waiting. it would be extremly time consuming to make anything good with it

you could use blender, but its rigging system is poorly documented, and the .x exporter is rarther hit and miss

^ i have no expiriance of anamating with code, but i would suspect that it is hard to make fluid and naturalistic anamations

I started a game for the Nvidia compo and went for the internal animation Van describes. The reason for this: I wanted my character to point his guns at different enemies, whether he was running, jumping, flying, standing still etc.
Now doing the running,walking etc was dead simple - you can even have your character looking at interesting landmarks/enemies as he is running, landing from a jump with varying knee bend depending on the hight he as landed from, etc, all very simple.
My 3D canvas pro then broke and wouldn't re-install, and the project was mothballed. So I never got to the fun bit of getting my character to point his guns at an enemy, which I would imagine would take mathematics skills, patience, and much coffe. But having got an internal animation system going, I must conclude that this would be very do-able

Just to second Van B, by rolling your own animation system you can do some things easier like incorporating rag doll physics.
--
TAZ