Adventures in fragMOTION: Merging & protoTyping the baseHuman

Greetings! Happy New Year!

My last Posting on fragMOTION delt with the program's ability to mimic Torque's mounting scheme and the Customizable UI that the author has provided. Both of the features lead to an increased workflow for the lowEnd modelling enthusist/developer.

Today's Posting will concentrate on Merging and how it relates to Skeletal Rigging and Animation Sequences previously created and stored within another file. I believe Importing to replace the current Scene, while Merging will combine portions of another file with the current Scene. This became important as I found, thru protoTyping, that my skeleton needed a bit of extra freedom between the Clavicles and Head.

I had been working on my 'baseHuman' figure recently. This is my attempt to get a nice, generic-sized human figure with a fair number of mountNodes logically positioned and a high degree of hand articulation constructed for my long range workSim I'm constructing. Having a little familiarity with the Character Studio Biped, I based my initial construction on that hierarchy, which coincindently; is what the TGE 'Kork' is based upon, as well as any early SDK examples, if I'm not mistaken.

I gave the Biped a little more flexibility and localization by separating the upper and lower parts of the body, having them branch from the base Biped Node, that was not an issue as I'd not really animated anything yet. This, I'm thinking, will perhaps help later on with keeping my lowerBody actionThreads from conflicting with my upperbody armThreads; plus it gave the player a very flexible lower body in relation to it's upper, keeping any kicking sequence from throwing any IK into the upper body holding a steady weapon, ;). I had been building my DTS skeletons by keeping a gameSpace scene with IK Groupings and it was simple relinking inside the objectTree and off I went...I began to animate some poses and basic motions. This is where I began to encounter some issues that normally would prove fairly hairy to navigate, but as this series of articles is intended to show, fragMO has some features that make this type of 'quick thinking' manuever possible.

I animated some quick sequences to check articulation again and 'thought' everything was easily poseable from the current configuration; ha! I did a backFlip, walkForward, sitDown, fallDown, crouchDown and some typing poses...things looked grand. I quickly found my original placement of the baseThumb node wasn't going to accomodate the lovely NetGeos M16a offered as a Christmas gift, so I went back into gS and gave a wider grip to the hands and I began to pose away! Gee, this seems to be about gS and rigs...almost. This is where the features of fragMOTION begin to shine brightly.

So, I had lower body & some upper body animations stored inside a shape that had Thumbs positioned differently than the current Scene inhabitant, bummer. To further 'complicate' things; I also noticed that the original location of the Clavicles below the Neck and above the Head would not allow the Head enough flexibility to get a decent look to the rifle. Man, I was hosed, so I thought. I've lost my other sequences...

Resigning myself to redoing the earlier test, I decided to rebuild my rig inside fragMO this time. That took a little T & E to get things worked out, and shortly I had a new rig, still Bound to the Mesh btw, that had been relinked to have the Neck[& arms] and newly created "Biped01 Throat"[& head, etal] node branching from the Spine2 node. This was really going to screw up my earlier animations dealing with typing and griping the weapon; or so I thought.

I decided to attempt a full onslaught right away. With the newly restructured skeleton with mesh bound inside the fragMOTION scene, I decided to 'attempt' to bring my completed sequences into this entirely different file. File--Merge, and I was presented with a browse dialog. I selected my previously animated .ugh file, and was presented with another dialog. This dialog resembled the entire CharacterSchema of a fragMOTION Scene, I think. Listed in Tree form, with radioCheck boxes to include/exclude stored data, I began to exclude any mesh, material, and texture information. I then checked the sequence I wanted keyframe data for and then began to systematically exclude the Thumb nodes[and down] and the Head node[etal].

Well...it worked perfectly! I went back and brought every sequence I created with the earlier restructured rig into this current Scene with a new skeleton, and the existing Bones followed the keyframe data exactly, except for any Bone I didn't include with the Merge. So, I got no keyframes for my Head or my Thumbs...but I brought in all the other exisiting keyframes, and better yet; nothing seemed borked. All stored poses and motions played as before, while using a different skeleton! Whew! Saved a little work and learned some new stuf! Looks like even more is possible, in the lowEnd, ;)!

I've established a Group over at GGE, [gge_group=lowEndz], join in the lowEnd maddness!!


...Oh, and btw: I also embedded a new Tool Button in my Main Tool Menu. One nice animation Feature is called Onion Skin Preview. This is a Preference setting to show an editable number of Keyframes before & after the current Frame#. Rendering is variable from beginning to end frame, how cool; from a lowEnd modelling program! Really helps get feet and other limbs aligned from Keyframe to Keyframe. Now, I can toggle on/off in the main UI, instead of having to open the Preference dialog and paging around...;)! Thanks fragMO!!!