Animating Monsters for New Doomsday Model Formats

edited 2014 Dec 26 in Addons for DOOM
Hey, a quick one here.

When animating characters for the old MD2 format, characters stayed on the zero point no matter what they were doing. As an example, the character in a run animation would 'run in place', never leaving the zero point. The effect being of them on a treadmill.

In animating for Doom 3 in MD5 format, the character has to actually move as they would in the animation off the zero point. The character walks away from the zero point in the animation, as if they were on a solid surface rather than a treadmill.

So, the question I'm asking is, in Doomsday's implementation of MD5, do characters stay on the zero point or do they walk off of it? I don't want to animate a load of critters and then find out that its 'wrong'.

Comments

  • You should always animate the objects as if they were on a treadmill — you can temporarily move off the zero point during the cycle, but the animation needs to return to same point as in the beginning of the cycle. The engine will be moving the object's zero point as it moves, so the model itself doesn't have to worry about this.

    In other words, the animations should always be relative to the model space origin.

    The tricky part here is syncing the speed of the feet to the speed of the object so it doesn't look like the guy is ice skating. Doom enemies tend to move at pretty fixed speeds, though. I might eventually implement some sort of runtime editing mode to make this easier.
    In animating for Doom 3 in MD5 format, the character has to actually move as they would in the animation off the zero point.
    Is this documented somewhere? I would have expected the engine to control the object's zero point (it could just be centering the model, I guess).
  • i know nothing of this but had a quick read of this http://tfc.duke.free.fr/coding/md5-specs-en.html and it appears that the md5 format only stores the orientation not the where abouts it is in relative space. so the rest needs to be Handled by the engine.
  • How long until we are able to test out animations in doomsday?
    I got a few models rigged, and want to play around with it.
  • Here is an example of a new-style model package: net.dengine.testmodel.pack

    Currently the only way to load a package like this is to put it somewhere it can be found automatically (like your runtime folder) and then add "-pkg (id)" to the command line, where (id) is the identifier of the package (net.dengine.testmodel in this case).

    Have you checked out these wiki pages:
    At present (in 1.15 unstable builds) the new model animation only supports state-based animations on things, where a particular model animation sequence is started when the thing enters a particular state. (The example model above specifies a "timeline" for the animation but that is currently ignored.)

    During the 1.16 unstable builds I plan to make the animation mechanism more sophisticated so you can control things like how quickly the sequence progresses and how the thing's movement affects the animation.
  • Just a few degrees off topic, but are you using a different mesh format for static models?
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