Weighting the Characters

Now that the animations are working (I figured out how to solve the tweaking issue). It now becomes my pleasure to bind our rig to each of our characters, This is a somewhat tedious process where each vertex is assigned a weight from 0 to 1 which indicates how each bone in the skeleton deforms the mesh.

After each character is rigged I will be able to begin their animation cycles. Currently I have rigged and weighted one of our Tank characters. Check it out below.

It's ALIVE (Animations are Working)

Well we have officially gotten our custom animation to function in our model viewer, which means that it will work int the game. There are a few weird things going on though. One foot on the character tweaks out, and the left side of the characters body seems to have shrunk in comparison to the left, this is very strange in the sense that it has messed with the geometry. So moving on from here, we need to figure out how to call different parts of the animation in the code, because we will only have one FBX file for all the animations. We also just need to start getting our characters completely modeled.

Animation Success

The animation is so close to being up and running, I can feel it. I have successfully rigged, animated, and exported an FBX file using our basic model. All of this is up to the specifications of the Digital Tutors tutorial where they successfully imported a character into XNA. I know that this is going to work because all of the strange errors that were appearing the last time I went through this process are gone. The only challenge that remains is this mysterious "Take" issue. In the example animation character that XNA provides there is a name called Take1 associated with the FBX file, in other words the animation is named and then is called upon in the code. I thought I had exported the name of my animation clip with the FBX file but it doesn't seem so, therefore we will continue moving forward from here and hopefully have animations working very soon.

Check out my animation below.

I've developed about half the character rig for our simple model that is to the specifications of the digital tutors tutorial. This should hypothetically give us a rig for animation that will work in XNA.

Progress

So as of our last class meeting, we were stuck as to how we were going to move our animations out of Maya as an FBX file and into XNA. While we have not successfully gotten one of our animations to work in XNA yet, I have made progress in researching how we can possibly accomplish this. After contacting the Beware of Dog team I discovered that they were baking their animations in Maya. This was enough of a hint for me to go out to several forums and read up on how others were experiencing the same issues that we were.

This in turn led me to Digital Tutors, although it is not free, the link below is a step by step guide on how to create a pipeline from Maya to XNA. I have followed the guide on how to export a mesh from Maya on multiple rigs however it still has not produced a successful result. I still feel that this guide offers the best bet on how to solve this issue. Dan also has the ability to access the training, therefore we can look for any hints on the code side as well.

I believe we are inching ever closer to finally having a working animation.

Here is the link to the Digital Tutors tutorial.

The infinite animation issues

Dan has successfully added animation code to our model viewer, as of right now we have found an FBX file that someone has animated a character walking. That seems to work successfully.

I have imported that model into Maya in order to search for clues as to how the working animation functioned in Maya. What I found was a little counter intuitive. It seemed as if the animator was no using a rig at all and was actually animating the joints themselves.

I did an animation test which can be viewed below, using our our base character model I put a skeleton in the mesh and did some quick skinning, and then created quite possibly the worst walk cycle ever conceived by man haha.

Finally after a few hours of work and then actually having our character "animated" in Maya, I exported him out as an FBX file (still receiving warnings) and once again  I am still getting errors. This time it's saying there is an input skeleton error whatever that means.

So still not much progress, I'm going to work on contacting the team that worked with 3D last year and figure out what they possibly did to get a functioning 3D model.

All this technical stuff is getting exhausting......

FBX transfer issues

As of right now I've hit a wall. I am trying to figure out how to export complex rigs with animation from Maya as FBX files so that they can be used in the game. After further research into this issue I am coming up with inconclusive results. It seems that I am able to export and mesh and as long as the animations are associated with the mesh itself they work in the game, such as what was demonstrated in the prototype. It seems that the instance a rig is associated with the mesh it presents all kinds of problems.

On a side note I am still teaching myself how to rig, just waiting on the other members of the art team to come up with some models. On my test rig I have a full IK system on the arm that stretches, this rigging experience has been valuable because I have encountered issues that will be easily avoidable when I set up a rig for our actual characters.

Rigging the Arm

I have successfully gotten the SVN to work on my workstation at home, therefore we can now attempt to set up a pipeline for testing animations in the game. On another note I am continuing work on my test rig.

It is necessary to create a strong rig that is not going to break. This rig is almost entirely IK and this is very much necessary for the feet so that I can animate properly.