GOAT and GOAL: A collection of modelling and animation utilities

[KnightErrant]

@Icedie
You're not pushing me, this is fun!
Arrgh, it's the same error just showing up in another place. Here's
ANOTHER work around and this can be fixed too. In my animated
.ms3d file or in yours, when in Milkshape click the Materials Tab and
then select the Attachments materials. Now click the comments
button. You should see this:



Same solution, put a space between that first 0 and the following 0.0000
and save the .ms3d file. Now animextract should work, sorry about that.
Remember to do the same fix when you make the .txt file.

[Icedie El Guaraní]

@KE Thank you so much mate its very nice, now i have a problem fixing the die animation for the chariot and the horse spine splitting in half when lying on the ground here are the 2 animation i need badly so i can move on to the next animation.
FS_chariot_horse_die_forward.ms3d
FS_chariot_horse_die_backward.ms3d
I already have 12 out of 38 apart from this die animations, its actually quite fun when you know what you are doing hopefully i will be able to finished by the end of next week.

[Rorarii]

Hi people, with financial markets crashing, i'm a tad busy at the moment. see when i can return.

R

[KnightErrant]

@Rorarii
Sigh, tell me about it. If my retirement is down on paper by a quarter
million, I suppose I can take comfort in the fact gas is 80 cents cheaper.
Count that as a win! Next week can only bring better news.
If we regress all the way to 1987 where I started I can begin over by
switching from Particle Physics to Business. Then I can mismanage a major
financial institution, trigger a global depression, get fired for incompetence,
and retire on an 80 million dollar golden parachute. That's Plan A; Plan B is
"Welcome to WALMART!"

@Icedie
Yes, this is fun. Now you've got the animation part down. Before
you spend too much time on animations, can you put them in game?
I mean the whole modifying descr_skeleton.txt and modeldb and
rebuilding the packs stuff. The reason I ask is the problem about
units turning. At this point, the chariots will turn about the rootbone
of the horse skeleton. How does this look? Bwian had to move the
rootbone backwards to be at the midpoint between the horses and
the chariots to get this to look natural so I just wanted to ask how
that looked before you went too far. This is still research, albeit fun
research, so how do the anims look to you? With horses, there's still
the question of a driver. We can only put on one real animated rider
with a horse so the driver would have to be a puppet (meaning a mesh
but without animation). These are some of the remaining questions for
getting a nice solution.

[Bwian]

Heh heh...spotting all this fun with chariots has inspired me to come out of retirement in asmall way. I had a load of fun playing with this a while back, but there were all sorts of barriers and issues with tool development....much of which appears to be solved or at least, solvable! Things were different in those pioneer days

Where to start!

1) Skeleton setup.
Initially I was working on turning a horse into a chariot. Logical start point..but more of that later. First thing I did wsas exactly what KE did and stuck a great big tail on. In my case...I literally stretched the tail like a chariot pole. This proved that I could mess with the horse skeleton and have it work. No-one else was messing with animal bones then, so this was all baby steps! First thing I noticed, though, was the way the thing turned. Turning is done relative to the root bone of hte model. In the case of hte horse...bone_h_saddle. This allows the rider to be more or less constant in relation to the horse when turning etc. Moving the rider a long way from the root in the mount text file can lead to the rider being 'left behind' when they rotate for a moment,So...I figured it was best to leave the saddle EXACTLY where CA left it...and move the rest of the horse!
If you take the bones from the 'shoulders' and move them forward, you get a wierd looking skeleton....but it works! Using KE's tools, the animations of the legs are moved in relation to the rest, but are undisturbed. Now, the chariot pivots around the saddle...which is the centre point of the chariot and axle site. This was how the RTW chariots turned. I was happy with that. Use a sidestep animation for the horse and a 90degree turn looked spot on.
this was when we discovered the broken horse animations too....which kept us baffled for weeks thinking it was our process or tools doing it!
the animation tools were in their infancy, and I lacked the time to work on this much more... but that was all we lacked.

2) Base Model.
The more I thought about this... the more I was ocnvinced that horse was the wrong base to build fom. elephant was the way to go. Gives you several BIG benefits.
a) They don't have jump animations!
b) They actually have an attack that scatters troops and doesn't rely on the rider....so no 'merging through the ranks' happens
c) Multiple missile troops could be carried
d) They have a non-combatant 'rider' to make a charioteer
Downside....no melee troops on the back.

So...I thought the plusses outweighed the negatives.

What am I doing ( good question! )
First off, I have taken an elephant skeleton and hammered it into the shape of a horse. Took me a it of time, but it is a long time since I messed with this stuff! Extra leg bones were needed..but that was easy enough to do.
Now I am copying across animations from the horse to the new elephant animations to make the bones move like a horses ones. When done, I will have something that moves like a horse, but is recognised by the game as an elephant.

I have a few extra things I want to do to this.... but broadly speaking....that's my start point.

KE...the more I think about htis the more I wonder....is there some way of Frankensteining the animations and skeletons to shortcut this? I am sure the definition of the skeleotns was in the headers...so if the elephant header could be sliced off and the necessary bone names altered...could we do something like that? And the same for animations?

Or...
Elephant header
horse skeleton with bones re-named for elephant ones so the saddle becomes the platform
Elephant footer

then, paste in horse values to the CAS file turned to TXT so we can turn them back?

Crazy...or possible?

[KnightErrant]

@Bwian
I think we can do everything with the tools and with .txt files.
There's 29 med_elephant anims and 39 fs_horse so there should be
enough horse anims to fill in almost all of the elephant actions.
(stand, stand_to_walk, stand_to_run etc. seem roughly common).
Nice thing about elephants is they only have one death anim.

Let's do med_elephant_walk for a concrete example. First convert it to
text with the convertcastotxt button. The "header" part that makes it an
elephant looks like this:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

3.210000 38 9 0 2.20000004768 1 0 104 104 104 1 0 104 104 104
 30749   0 
 24 0 0 1 2 3 4 2 6 7 1 9 10 11 12 9 14 9 16 1 18 19 1 21 22
 45  0.00000  0.05000  0.10000  0.15000  0.20000  0.25000  0.30000  0.35000  0.40000  0.45000  0.50000  0.55000  0.60000  0.65000  0.70000  0.75000  0.80000  0.85000  0.90000  0.95000  1.00000  1.05000  1.10000  1.15000  1.20000  1.25000  1.30000  1.35000  1.40000  1.45000  1.50000  1.55000  1.60000  1.65000  1.70000  1.75000  1.80000  1.85000  1.90000  1.95000  2.00000  2.05000  2.10000  2.15000  2.20000 
          Scene Root   0   0      0  16560   0   1   0 
     bone_E_platform  45  45      0  16560   0   1   0 
         bone_E_back  45  45    720  17100   0   1   0 
bone_E_right back thigh  45  45   1440  17640   0   1   0 
bone_E_right back lower leg  45  45   2160  18180   0   1   0 
bone_E_right back foot  45  45   2880  18720   0   1   0 
bone_E_left back thigh  45  45   3600  19260   0   1   0 
bone_E_left back lower leg  45  45   4320  19800   0   1   0 
bone_E_left back foot  45  45   5040  20340   0   1   0 
         bone_E_head  45  45   5760  20880   0   1   0 
      bone_E_trunk 1  45  45   6480  21420   0   1   0 
      bone_E_trunk 2  45  45   7200  21960   0   1   0 
      bone_E_trunk 3  45  45   7920  22500   0   1   0 
      bone_E_trunk 4  45  45   8640  23040   0   1   0 
bone_E_right ear main  45  45   9360  23580   0   1   0 
bone_E_right ear tip  45  45  10080  24120   0   1   0 
bone_E_left ear main  45  45  10800  24660   0   1   0 
 bone_E_left ear tip  45  45  11520  25200   0   1   0 
bone_E_right front thigh  45  45  12240  25740   0   1   0 
bone_E_right front lower leg  45  45  12960  26280   0   1   0 
bone_E_right front foot  45  45  13680  26820   0   1   0 
bone_E_left front thigh  45  45  14400  27360   0   1   0 
bone_E_left front lower leg  45  45  15120  27900   0   1   0 
bone_E_left front foot  45  45  15840  28440   0   1   0

This is a 45 frame animation because elephants walk slow.

Bwian: There's a bug in GOAT1_0 for the horse that has to be fixed by
hand right now. I'll send along a GOAT1_1 in a bit. Go to the bottom of
the .txt file and on the last line after the CaozSceneCustomAttribNode
look for 00.00000 and put in a space so it looks like 0 0.00000.

The corresponding fs_horse_walk is:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

3.210000 38 9 0 1.0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 102 102 102
 15046   0 
 24 0 0 1 2 3 4 3 6 7 8 3 10 11 12 1 14 1 16 17 18 1 20 21 22
 21  0.00000  0.05000  0.10000  0.15000  0.20000  0.25000  0.30000  0.35000  0.40000  0.45000  0.50000  0.55000  0.60000  0.65000  0.70000  0.75000  0.80000  0.85000  0.90000  0.95000  1.00000 
          Scene Root   0   0      0   7728   0   1   0 
       bone_H_Saddle  21  21      0   7728   0   1   0 
          bone_Spine  21  21    336   7980   0   1   0 
         bone_Spine1  21  21    672   8232   0   1   0 
           bone_Neck  21  21   1008   8484   0   1   0 
           bone_Head  21  21   1344   8736   0   1   0 
       bone_RightArm  21  21   1680   8988   0   1   0 
   bone_RightForeArm  21  21   2016   9240   0   1   0 
      bone_RightHand  21  21   2352   9492   0   1   0 
bone_RightFingerBase  21  21   2688   9744   0   1   0 
        bone_LeftArm  21  21   3024   9996   0   1   0 
    bone_LeftForeArm  21  21   3360  10248   0   1   0 
       bone_LeftHand  21  21   3696  10500   0   1   0 
 bone_LeftFingerBase  21  21   4032  10752   0   1   0 
          bone_Tail1  21  21   4368  11004   0   1   0 
          bone_Tail2  21  21   4704  11256   0   1   0 
     bone_RightUpLeg  21  21   5040  11508   0   1   0 
       bone_RightLeg  21  21   5376  11760   0   1   0 
      bone_RightFoot  21  21   5712  12012   0   1   0 
   bone_RightToeBase  21  21   6048  12264   0   1   0 
      bone_LeftUpLeg  21  21   6384  12516   0   1   0 
        bone_LeftLeg  21  21   6720  12768   0   1   0 
       bone_LeftFoot  21  21   7056  13020   0   1   0 
    bone_LeftToeBase  21  21   7392  13272   0   1   0

What makes an elephant an elephant is the footer, that last line
in the file, the first line, the third line which defines the hierarchy.
The fourth line are the time ticks. So to steal the horse anims,
we replace the elephant time ticks line with the horse line. Then
we change all the 45's that follow the elephant bone names to 21's.

Now here's the main problem: horse legs have four bones and elephants
only three. Are you going to completely redo the elephant and get rid
of the trunk bones, ear bones, and really make it into a horse, or just
try and make do with three bone legs? The upper bone for all four
horse legs are really animated quite a bit so if we just steal the lower
three bones of the horse it won't work right. If we steal the upper
three bones, then the hooves will be static, which might not be too bad.

In any event, the cut-and-pasting begins. If the ears and trunk bones
are still in, we just agree no verts ever get assigned to them so we simply
delete 45-21=24 frames for all of them but otherwise they can animate
away and we don't care. For the legs, tail, spine, neck, and head we
delete the 45-frame elephant sections and substitute in the
21-frame horse sections. Do the same for the position animation sections.
Since everything but the root bone is essentially not animated you can
do this with one big delete and then a paste of the horse section, taking
care to do bone_E_platform and bone_H_saddle separately.

Finally replace the pose data of the elephant with the Frankenhorse
skeleton.

That's the do it by hand idea for a single animation. If that can be made
to work then I can make a special GOAT version with a
"Rustle Horse Anims" button where you get a FileChooser to select
an elephant anim and then another to select a matching horse anim,
and it does programmatically the steps outlined above.

I know I've glossed over things I haven't thought through but maybe you
have: horse is:
bone_H_saddle -> bone_spine -> bone_spine1 -> bone_neck -> bone_head
elephant only has
bone_E_platform, bone_E_back and bone_E_head
Sort of who goes with whom?

[SigniferOne]

I move that we apply the word Horsiphant to this whole entire project!

[KnightErrant]

I agree, horsiphant is just too good. Also, too focused on getting this done
to move on to the stone_keep to remember to call these the "expurgated
anims". Side bar:
"I don't like the gannet animation."
"Why?"
"They distort their fingerbases."
well, you just have to write your own dialog from here...

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?)