GOAT and GOAL: A collection of modelling and animation utilities

[Lord_Calidor]

KE, I'm having some weird problems while converting horses from mesh to ms3d & vice versa. I needed to edit a few horses' models and their UV maps, so the head, body, legs parts don't mix, but use determined "sets" of skin variants. Well anyway, I've converted the models, edited them in Milkshape, grouped the parts in new groups, edited the textures & UV maps, however when I convert them back to .mesh, UV maps seem to stretch all over the texture, some even extending out of it's boundaries. I've converted them back into ms3d and examined in Milkshape again, and sure enough, all UV maps are stretched by a factor of 2 to the right side.

What's happening here, and how can I solve this, except stretching the UV maps by 2 myself, the first time I work on a model (which make aligning the UVs along the right coordinates a bit difficult)?

[KnightErrant]

Off the top of my head it might be a naming thing. If it can't determine
that it's a mount, it might be applying the human rules for uvs. Make sure
your model has mount_ in the name and a lod0 (if it's a lod0) when you
back convert.

[SigniferOne]

KE, sorry to bug you with a question but I was wondering if the 3dsmax script was fixed. I remember it outputting erroneously (back to ms3d), but that was in July or something so maybe an updated version was released. What's the link to the latest version, or is it built into GOAT already?

[KnightErrant]

The GOAT release contains a Version 1_3 of the importexport script.
This includes the explicit normals fix. However, every so often I'm seeing
Max throw a System Error on export when it hits the line where I collapse
the modifier stack after I've read the normals out. This has been an ongoing
problem reported in the CG forums; in previous versions the collapseto
function simply didn't work when used in a script, but worked from the
listener. Seems like they fixed it to work only it seems buggy. Haven't
really been able to investigate it because it's intermittant, if I reboot it
works fine for awhile. So just a warning about that for Version 1_3.
If worse comes to worse, I can comment out that snippet leaving the
users to collapse the Edit Normals modifiers by hand.

[Lord_Calidor]

Off the top of my head it might be a naming thing. If it can't determine
that it's a mount, it might be applying the human rules for uvs. Make sure
your model has mount_ in the name and a lod0 (if it's a lod0) when you
back convert.

That's it! Great KE, you're the champ.
My horses didn't have mount_ in their name.

[B. Ward]

Now that I think of it, that is the reason...sorry I couldn't remember Lord_Calidor. I had that problem when KE released his initial siege and mount converter.

[KnightErrant]

@Lord_Calidor
Glad you got it working! Sorry, you've encountered
some of the rough edges remaining. Ideally, GOAT would
just figure it out but CAs models vary in format from siege
engines to mounts to regular units. I settled on this not ideal
method: exact matches for siege engine name, just matching
for mount_ in the name for mounts (and an extra check for
camel or elephant to distinguish from horses), and finally
defaulting to humans if nothing else matches. You found the
failure mechanism for this strategy.

[Lord_Calidor]

You found the
failure mechanism for this strategy.

Well, it seems I always do. Both real life & cyber world. Not even gonna mention how many new thingies I RTM'ed in the past 2 yrs.

[Revan Shan]

I have not tried with M2TW, but I recall on RTW that trying to put a mounted melee unit on the elephants resulted in a crash. I think ther eis a conflict between the actual unit attacking, and the mount attacking. The horse doesn't actually make an attack...there is just an animation to play when the rider is attacking. I really can't see this being different, sadly. In all honesty, though, charioteers tended to be archer or javelin armed anyway. For direct impact, just CHAAAAARGE!!!!
Best bit is that you have a chariot driver. Currently, the stock ones animate to an awkward pose to fit on an elephant, but since the legs don't actually move, all we would need would be a model with the leg vertices assigned to the pelvis, so they would remain in the same pose. No need to re-design the animations to do it. Then you get an animated, degtachable charioteer.

This weekend I plan to complete phase 2 of the plan and clean up the horse animations some. If you have a quick way of doing this ( or can let me know which figures I need to adjust in the text files ( I know it was just the fingerbase ones....but I am not sure which column to change or what values to put in ) then it will be easy to sort.

Then I will re-site the bulk of the horse, leaving the root where it is, add in a 'correction' bone, chariot pole and axle bones, and re-build the animations. A proper chariot and double horse model then needs to be added for eye-candy value.

Hopefully, KE can then talk me through cancelling out the wobble factor, and I can do the wheels.

Fingers crossed I can get most of this done over the weekend!

What are you doing now? Will you keep up with warhammer total war?

[Bwian]

Well...this took a little longer than expected, but then, these things always do!

Following on from previous experiments, we have discovered a limit to the number of bones. 26 shalt though not count....neither shall ye count 27. 28 is right out. For yea, it is written in the Book of Armaments that the number ye shall count is 25 and 25 shall be the number of the count.

( if the above sounds like gibberish you are one of the uncultured ones who have never seen Pythons Quest for the Holy Grail, and should be ashamed of yourself! )

Anyway....in short...put in more than 25 bones into a skeleton, and it does not work properly. The vertices on the 'end' bones in the chain do not render properly in game, and the parts appear squashed flat. The chariot was using 1 too many bones, and by removing the tail we were able to fix that. Now I just need to tidy up the animations and re-attach the elephant headers and footers, and we are done. Fingers crossed...but I think we have crossed the last barrier to making a working chariot that smashes through troops, kills by impact, and carries up to 3 passengers including a proper charioteer.

As an encore this evening, I tried the same trick of grafting elephant characteristics onto a human skeleton. Yes...I made an elephant man.....

I need to scale up the mesh and add in a proper model... but he smashes troops out of the way when he runs through their line, and knocks down 4 or 5 men at a time in melee. Makes a sweet base for a troll or ogre unit. Solves all the issues with just scaling up a man, and has all the impact on the enemy of several tons of rampant pachyderm

[KnightErrant]

And of course,

"Chargest thou the holy Horsiphant of Antioch, so that thine enemies,
being not in my sight, shall snuff it."

Since this chariot work touches several really interesting techniques spread
over this thread, let me recap:
(1) 25 bone limit for models. Hard for mounts which start off with 23, have
to be flexible to do what you want. Not so bad for humans at all, you get
5 extra bones at no cost and you could easily steal the clavicals or
bone_jaw or bone_eyebrow to do more.
(2) Offset meshes to get double horses. Have to tweak the animations
(zero out or reduce y and z rotations) to remove bad effects; for the
horsiphant this was mainly the fingerbase bones.
(3) Using elephant header/footer in the horse or humanoid anims to get
elephant behavior. This was a really clever innovation.
(4) This one is kind of mathematical, but you offset a bone slightly from
the root, and then it's possible to calculate the inverse rotations of the
root bone to remove them from the bone chain coming off this bone.
This should make it possible to make a clean set of anims to start with
without having to do it all in the keyframer. This is one example of doing
animation work just with the .txt file representation of a .cas file.

[Tchouk]

KnightErrant,

Could you try this utility and tell me what you think? (I think it makes animation work a hell of a lot easier! )

Also, we have a tool that transforms inverse kinematic animations into regular ones - and for those that know how to work with them, animating becomes much more doable. We plan on writing a tutorial and uploading a configured vanilla skeleton in the near future.

[King Kong]

Hi Bwian,

Anyway....in short...put in more than 25 bones into a skeleton, and it does not work properly. The vertices on the 'end' bones in the chain do not render properly in game, and the parts appear squashed flat. The chariot was using 1 too many bones, and by removing the tail we were able to fix that. Now I just need to tidy up the animations and re-attach the elephant headers and footers, and we are done. Fingers crossed...but I think we have crossed the last barrier to making a working chariot that smashes through troops, kills by impact, and carries up to 3 passengers including a proper charioteer.

Wow, This sounds really awesome! Cant wait to see a chariot for M2.

As an encore this evening, I tried the same trick of grafting elephant characteristics onto a human skeleton. Yes...I made an elephant man.....

I need to scale up the mesh and add in a proper model... but he smashes troops out of the way when he runs through their line, and knocks down 4 or 5 men at a time in melee. Makes a sweet base for a troll or ogre unit. Solves all the issues with just scaling up a man, and has all the impact on the enemy of several tons of rampant pachyderm

This is really interesting since I have made some trolls for TATW and I was also trying to give them the effects that you described, but I have no idea how I can do this...
Could you maybe help me a bit how to give my trolls such effects that your elephant man has?
I would really appreciate that.

[KnightErrant]

@Tchouk

Yes, I think I downloaded it as soon as I saw it in another thread.
I recognize the Verc script part of it for animations, this is the same
road I followed to do the importer/exporter for animated .ms3d files.
This is much better since you can skip the animmerge and animextract
process if you work solely in Max.

What I'm really interested in is the inverse kinematics tool. As you know,
MaxScript can't create a real bone system, which is why Verc's script only
uses bone helpers and my importer/exporter has to do the same thing.
I assume you have a real bone system for the human units and are able
to use the Max tools on that and transfer those frames to a bone
helper systems for export. That seems like a really good idea and a big
help to animators who know how to use these really powerful elements
of Max.

@King Kong,
Bwian's magic probably involves the modeldb and other things, but the bit
about animation file headers can be done with the Convertcastotxt and
Converttxttocas buttons. I'll wait and let Bwian describe how the whole
thing is done when he's happy with his chariots, but if you want a little
preview of the process, try the Convertcastotxt button for GOAT on a
elephant .cas file. This should give you a .txt representation of a
.cas file. The elephant header part, and the elephant footer, is different
from a horse mount file. (Convert both to .txt and compare.) You can
suborne horses to be elephants by taking the horse animation family
and putting elephant headers/footers on them. This probably needs
more things in modeldb and EDU to make it work so wait for Bwian
to document the whole procedure, but this is part of the process.

[King Kong]

Hi Knight Errant,

Thanks for your reply, as always.
I wouldn't have thought that something like that with this text headers would be possible, but it is great to know that it is, thanks to your tools.
Bwian also explained me a bit how to do that, but I couldn't try it yet.
I'll let you know what the result is...

[Bwian]

This is a rough outline of the process, step by step. It does not include making a new skeleton or model, since that is something which is covered in the instrcutions that ship with KE's toolkit... this is a supplement to it. I will try and flower it up with some pictures later on.... but this is something to play about with now:

Step 1: Choose your donor model...it can be absolutely any human model, but depending on the weapon it carries, you will need to choose your animations accordingly. I chose a simple mace animation set, since I wanted a nice simple smash type attack, with no stabbing for my end product.

Step 2: Go into the descr_skeleton text file and copy the section that relates to elephant animations. Put it into a new text file for now. We will need to do some simple text editing to get things ready here.

Step 3: Change the file paths in all the new text file to represent where we are going to put our new animations. Mine was in a folder called fs_troll ... so I changed the paths in the text file for ALL the animations to point to this folder. Next, look at the animations in the elephant set, and choose one from the human set that roughly matches. run to walk, walk to run etc. You will find there is a human animation already there in the donor set that fits. Change the names and evt files to match the donor human one...but change NOTHING else. This gives us a chunk of text that looks like hte elephant one, is classed as elephant, but has a list of human animations.

Step 4: Set up your fs_troll or equivalent folder, and copy in the animations you have selected into this folder. We will be making changes to the files, so you need to have a seperate set to avoid messing up the stock ones.

Step 5: Copy your new text chunk back into descr_skeleton. Delete the animation packs so they will be rebuilt when the game runs and include your newly created stuff.

Step 6: Convert each of your files in fs_troll to text using the GOAT toolkit.

Next...take a close look at your text file.

+3.210 38 9 0 +0.600 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 102 102 102
2 8548 0
3 21 0 0 1 2 3 1 5 6 7 7 6 10 11 12 6 14 15 16 1 18 19
4 13 +0.000 +0.050 +0.100 +0.150 +0.200 +0.250 +0.300 +0.350 +0.400 +0.450 +0.500 +0.550 +0.600
5 Scene Root 0 0 0 4160 0 1 0
6 bone_pelvis 13 13 0 4160 0 1 0
7 bone_RThigh 13 13 208 4316 0 1 0
8 bone_Rlowerleg 13 13 416 4472 0 1 0
9 bone_Rfoot 13 13 624 4628 0 1 0
10 bone_abs 13 13 832 4784 0 1 0
11 bone_torso 13 13 1040 4940 0 1 0
12 bone_head 13 13 1248 5096 0 1 0
13 bone_jaw 13 13 1456 5252 0 1 0

According to the instructions in the GOAT tools, the red section above is the critical part of the header. Convert an elephant animation to text, and you will see that it is different. This part of hte header makes the thing an elephant, not a man. Copy the elephant one, and paste over the humn one.

Do the same with the footer. It should look something like this:
170 1 2 CaozSceneCustomAttribNode 1 0 1 0 0 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 1.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0 0 -1 0 Plane 1 0 1 0 0 -0.70711 0.00000 0.00000 0.70711 2.43048 -4.76820 -7.87057 0 0 0 0 2 16 2 0 0 16 3 0 0 16 8 0 0 16 10 0 0 73 5 1 0 0.83813 0.61202 0.61202 1.00000 0.20000 0.20000 0.20000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 12 12 0

Copy the one form the elephant and paste it over the one from the human. Lastly, if you wish to actually have a 'rider' on the thing, you need to change the root bone name from bone_pelvie to e_bone_platform ... as it is in the elephant. Don't forget to make the corresponding name change in your model too if you changethe bone!

Save the text file and convert back to CAS. Re-name to take out hte 'converted' bit and put it in your fs_troll folder. Repeat with all the animations.

This is the basics all done.

Change Modeldb now, by adding a new entry. Copy the elephant one, and replace the model name for your human model. Replace the animation set it uses with fs_troll, but leave the rest as it is.

Lastly, change descr_mount by adding a new mount...say...fs_troll using the model you just created in modeldb, and leaving the type as elephant. You have to leave at lease one ride rin, but this is not a problem long term. You can re-site the rider where it will not be seen, or...if you left the bone name for the root unchanged, the rider only appears when the unit dies...but again, careful location of hte rider offset puts it well out of sight! I thought of making a 'rider; that was just a skull, and attaching a few to the belt...then they fall off when he dies anyway... I digress!

Create your entry in the descr_unit file using your chosen 'rider' and troll mount. I copied the stock elephant one. You need to edit the combat stats for the primary...these ar emissile weapons in that unit... so I just copied hte secondary stats over the primary. This gives the rider a null melee attack...but ensures the mount engages in melee. If hte rider is left as a missile type, the unit will tend to stand off or just not attack. A melee set of stats changes that behaviour. Make sure you adjust the units number of men/mounts to reflect any changes to the number of passengers. Get this wrong and you trigger the dreaded 'unspecified error'!!!!

Save all that, and run your game. If all has gone well, you should have a normal unit that looks oh so human....but scatters troops like an elephant, and knocks down 3 or 4 men at a swipe in melee.

Once you have that working, you can modify your skeleton, change your mesh to your troll / giant / whatever and just apply the new skeleton to your fs_troll animations. Once you have your elephant man working right, the process of modifying is just a question of applying ht eknown method for making a non-human skeleton and then changing the headers over.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is all there is to it

[SigniferOne]

Bwian, good to see you here. Did you get done with the chariots?

[Icedie El Guaraní]

How about you signiferone, have you finish with your slinger animation?

[Bwian]

Hi SigniferOne.

Chariots got pushed to the back burner when I just about gave up modding, but seeing KE was active with his toolbox again inspired me to give it another shot. I have been working closely with KE to tweak the tool to cope with the unusual and the non-standard and to handle all sorts of potential stuff with mounts as well as humans. We have found and cured a few bugs in the tool with regard to textures and scaling, and have discovered how to pull off some interesting tricks by text editing the animations.

We have so far got a cure for the rather poor stock horse animations ( which have some extreme and unwanted rotations ), sorted out an issue with how the tool handled the 1.12 scaled models ( been testing tonight on the latestfix from KE with great success ) and currently have a twin horse setup with the horse pushed forward and the rider sitting over the root bone.

Some text editing will now fix the animations, and allow me to add in rotations to cancel out the root bone movements and make the wheels turn. This will allow the chariot to sit fixed and steady on teh ground while the horses move. By keeping the root bone fixed and moving the horse skeleton forward, teh thing pivots around the root rather than swinging hte chariot. This is how the old RTW ones did it.

Last thing will be to edit the headers to make the game treat it like an elephant rather than a horse. This will allow a 'rider' as the charioteer and up to three passengers with missile weapons. It also allow the chariot to be used as a battering ram that does damage to troops. This has already been tested and found to work OK.

Once I piece all this together, we will have a working model for a chariot which I hope to release this side of Christmas. This will include a basic mesh, animation set and supporting text to allow modders to include this in their mod or use as a base to slap their own mesh over.

Unless we find another bug, this is in the bag now!

[SigniferOne]

Excellent!

Oh, and did I mention +rep?

(hrm it won't let me, did I really give you another rep in recent times?)