Sorry your browser is not supported!

Hi,

Heres a glimpse of an application I'm working on and nearly finished which I think will be quite useful for DBers. I've been developing as a tool for making characters in Succession: The Betrayal, but I thought it may be useful to a lot of people.

Its a program which takes the hassle out of character building and animating in DBPro. Its basic purpose is to enable you to build characters from various meshs using limbs and animate them in a file format which will be loadable/useable in DB/DBPro.

I've still got the animation commands to finish and bug testing and I've also got to create an exporter to export a character as a hierachal limb-based X model (although it already works to export characters as a single mesh), but its getting there.

I might still implement a system wherby users can make plugins to export to various file formats, but that'll take some time.

Anyway, heres the shots:

Shot 1: Shows a robot character I made out of various meshes I exported from Caligari Truespace as X files.



Shot 2: Shows a model imported from the orginal X model (which originally came from Dark Matter) and proves that it correctly imports the structure.




Anyway, I'll release a demo once the animation commands are in.

Cheers,

i'm definately gonna be needing this some time in the future! I remeber u mentioning something about this in the past! Looks cool so far, and i hope all goes well

Looking sweet, and if it really works, I'll order a dozen

Hmm...I'm not getting the pictures. Just me?

maybe its still loading Shining

looks cool on the pics man!

damn .. it can build models, animate, and put textures? awesome ...

That's a good idea. Is it going to be a normal format (.x,.3ds) or your own?

@Solidus Snake

I think it just assembles limbs and records thier motion to animate. It would be extremely difficult to make a real modeller in DB.

Hexgear & Rapscallion: Cheers for the comments. Its the sort of tool I've wanted someone to program geared towards DB community which I've wanted someone to come up with for ages. In the end, I just thought I'll write my own. Hexgear, you're right, I've mentioned this sort of thing before! A couple of years ago I created something similar in DB but nothing like as ambitious in terms of functionality and I could never get it as I wanted it. Now, I know a lot more and its nearly there.

Shining Moonblade: If the pictures aren't coming up you can go to:

http://www.successionthebetrayal.com/files/evolution1.jpg and
http://www.successionthebetrayal.com/files/evolution2.jpg in your browser to have a gander.

Solidus: Yeh, you're right. It assembles a character from individual meshes saved in X format - and when DBPro again supports it, 3DS. It textures the limbs and helps you animate the model on the whole. It doesn't model (yet!!!!) and its geared towards making characters for use in DBClassic/Pro Programs from a series of limbs. Basically, I'm ok at a making the odd limb, but putting it all together into a character model and then animating it has always been a bit of a nightmare for me so I wanted to make it easier.

Andrew11:
Models- It saves models to X (as a single mesh) and will save to X with limb structure intact when I've finished coding it. It also saves to a custom format - which actually is pretty good, because it saves all the model data (textures,mesh) internally in a single file, so now need to worry about looking for that texture thats supposed to go with it. I'm going to release it with some DBPro functions to load that format in. In addition, I'm going to release an SDK with it which will show people how to write exporter plugins for it in DBPro, so initially it will save X and my custom format and eventually...anything.

Animation- It saves the animation data to a custom file, which again will be useable in DB/DBPro with some functions I'll release. I might try and work hard at figuring out how DirectX X files save animations then I'll be able to implement it saving DirectX X files with all animation data intact. One thing though, my custom file format for animations doesn't just save animation data for rotation but also scaling and positioning. Anyway I'll release some functions with it that make it all possible in DBC/DBPro.