Milkshape Fun: Speeding up animations and viewing vertex normals

[KnightErrant]

I found a couple of fun toys in Milkshape this morning while actually
looking for something else. People have been wanting to speed up
animations so I had made a SLERP animation tool that some people
have tried out. However, it seems that Milkshape already has this
tool. Load up an animated .ms3d file and then go to menu item
Tools->Scale Animation. It's about midway down like in the picture:



The interface is about as minimal as you can get:



It displays the current number of frames so put in something smaller to
speed up the animation or something bigger to slow it down. I'm assuming
it does Spherical Linear Interpolation (SLERP) on the quaternions and
regular linear interpolation on the position animations.

Main warning: only do this OUTSIDE the keyframer. If you do it in the
keyframer you get something scary like this:



If you accidentally do it anyway, go to Edit->Undo Scale Animation to recover.

Other things to know when speeding up animations.

Down-sampling or reducing the number of frames destroys information.
So if you down-sample and don't like the results, do Edit->Undo Scale Animation
to go back to the original data, don't up-sample it.

If you want to speed up a fight animation, first go to descr_skeleton.txt
and find its entry and take note of what it has for an impact frame.
That's the command line switch -if: followed by a number. This is how
the game choreographs your guy's fighting anim to the reaction of your
opponent. If you don't do this then you'll chop a guy down but he
won't react until 10 frames later. With numbers, if you have a 31 frame
fight animation with an impact frame at 20, and you change it to a
21 frame animation, the new impact frame should be around 20*21/31
or roughly frame 14.


The other fun toy is the Selection Editor. I haven't decided what it is
actually supposed to be used for but it displays vertex normals.
If you have a lighting seam like this:



You can see the vertex normals causing this using the Selection Editor.
Go to Tools->Selection Editor. Then click Ok on the first "Release Notes"
dialog and No on the "Create Shortcut" dialog and you get to the editor.
There's a row of buttons so hover over the last button on the right,
it should say "Normals". Click it and it displays the vertex normals for
the model.



There's actually two coincident vertex vectors all across the head and
they have normals pointing in different directions. Lighting is controlled
by the dot product of the lighting vector into the normal vector so you
get a jump in the illuminance across the seam.

[Sir Andrew the Mighty Peasant]

Nice finds KE!

The Selection Editor in particular seems interesting :hmmm:

[Comrade the Colonel]

nice, i need to try that out then

[SigniferOne]

I can't get Scale Animation to work. If I do it while "Animate" is pressed, it produces messed up skeleton results. If I do it while Animate is unpressed, it merely cuts off the animation without actually scaling it any.

Also KE, could you change the dialog boxes so that the program doesn't quit whenever you press Cancel...

PS. Animextract does not work on the 4bones version. Not sure why that is. Also when extracting, it gives a completely separate .cas name... strange.

[Icedie El Guaraní]

I did scale my skeleton with the "scale all" but i have´t try it out in game maybe this is of help!!

[KnightErrant]

@SigniferOne
Hmmm, I tried it out again today and it does work for me. I took a 29
frame anim down to 9 and I do get the full animation, just very, very
fast. It does have some bugs though. Definitely, DON'T use it from the
keyframer, that was my main warning, you get horribly messed up
animations, probably because it uses the current frame as the basepose
to interpolate from. Also, Edit->Undo Scale Animation doesn't reset
the max frames back to the original value so the animation cuts off.
You have to remember what the original max frames value was and
manually reset it; not a good user interface detail.

I did remember your suggestion about not killing the script when you
cancel out of a File Chooser, and I put it into every utility so now you
just revert to the main dialog of GOAT. I don't know if every user will
want this, but I've also included a goat.ini file so users can configure
where the File Choosers will open. Basically it's just a simple text file
like this:

# ===================================================================================
#                            goat.ini                                               |
# ===================================================================================
#                                                                                   |
#    Initialization file for the Game Object Application Toolbox.                   |
#                                                                                   |
# Set your preferred directories here for your models (.mesh and .ms3d files),      |
# animations (.cas files, usually Caliban's animations directory is a good choice), |
# and RTW raw format .cas animation files.                                          |
#                                                                                   |
# Handy Tip:  Set multiple directories for each type and simply comment out the     |
#             ones not needed at the present time.  NOTE: Only the last entry       |
#             processed will be valid; cannot have multiple modeldir etc. defined.  |
#                                                                                   |
# ===================================================================================
modeldir                = C:\sys\downloads\medievalII\meshreader_w2h_723\3dmaxscript\ObjectClasses\jpgsforMonkwarrior      
casdir                  = C:\sys\downloads\medievalII\calibansfiles\animations
RTWcasdir               = C:\sys\downloads\medievalII\meshreader_w2h_723\3dmaxscript\EBstuff\animations

You set modeldir to the full path to where your .ms3d models are, casdir
to Caliban's animation directory, and, if you do anything with RTW raw
animations, you can set RTWcasdir to that. This way instead of always
opening in the current working directory where you put the script, it will
open in your model directory when the script is looking for a .ms3d file
or in your cas directory when the script is looking for a .cas file.
Eliminates a lot of mousing around when navigating. Also, you can put
in multiple directories and just comment them in and out as you change
what directory you want to work in.

I'll send the update along to try out, but I'll check on the 4 bones
animation first to see what's going on there.

[Havie]

I wonder if theres anyway at all this would be applicable to shogun 2.

I dont think we have the same system in place with impact frames, at least if we do, im clueless as to how it all works.

Any1 gets any ideas, lmk pls as i need this for continuing my ROTK mod

[rafmc1989]

I remembered once I tried to do some modding on Shogun 2 (which is by far the best game of the TW series!), but it was so blocked and hardcoded, that I immediately gave up ahah

In any case, I don't think either the frames or the animations are compatible at all, too many years of distance between the two games, but who knows.....

[Havie]

thanks for your reply,

I've gotten some animation files open in 3ds max

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

http://imgur.com/mLsWWRT

how they work and come together is beyond me. Where that is coded idk.

In shogun there is an animation table which is a text file that sets up animation themes for a unit

so like katana_samurai are set up like this

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

nimation_table shogun_man_katana{
skeleton_type man_shogun


fragment shogun_man_unarmed_fragment
fragment shogun_man_katana_fragment default_equipment_display = primary_weapon, ambient
fragment shogun_man_katana_combat_fragment default_equipment_display = primary_weapon, ambient

fragment shogun_horse_rider_fragment default_equipment_display = primary_weapon, ambient
fragment shogun_horse_rider_katana_combat_fragment default_equipment_display = primary_weapon, ambient


mount_table shogun_mount_horse_katana
}

Then there are more text files for
shogun_man_katana_fragment
shogun_man_katana_combat_fragment
etc


Then you go find these text files and it has long lists of what animations it uses with the only value can edit time wise called Blend_time=X , the values seem to do nothing IG.

So how everything comes together idk... id sure like to figure out though.. bet its something hard coded I hate watching two troops just stare at eachother though and think about attacking for 5 seconds.. lol

[rafmc1989]

mmh, the fact that you got access to the animations in 3ds max is interesting, but I suspect there is no way to translate the new coding language (of Shogun) to the old one (of Medieval). Really, would be interesting to go deeper in this, but I suspect it's too hardcoded.

No clear idea about how to figure it out, but maybe something could be done, don't know

[Havie]

Yeah if anyone thinks of anything you can PM me,
Otherwise my exploration of the shogun2 animation files continues here:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...2#post15361262

[rafmc1989]

Nicee, I'll watch the thread closely (Shogun II is always in my special box, ready to be played again )