Stage 1 - Character

Character

I've been playing for a while trying to move my character from Maya to Torque. I have followed the dannyngan.com online tutorial that helped me a lot! Loading a static shape from Maya to Torque is really straight forward specially with the help of the dtsUtility; plugin. Everything went fine until I got into the Character Basics part... I was having problems with my character everytime I tried to export it to STP. I posted a forum thread explaining my problem, and with the help from Affectworks I managed to get through that with no prob!.


Finally I had my character showing up fine in STP with the animations running. So far I learned that I have to be really carefull with name conventions, I cant just play arround with names or I will get trouble ahead!

Files that I consider important to know about:

- player.dts - Its the file that contains the mesh and skinning data (path: '.demo\data\shapes\player\...).
- player_.dsq - are the files that contains the animation data for each sequence (path: '.demo\data\shapes\player\...).
- player.cs - the script file that 'merges' the animations (*.dqs) with the shape itself (.dts). (path: '.demo\data\shapes\player\...).

I can use a completly different path for my character though, but to do this I also have to change the 'player.cs' file in path:'.\demo\server\scripts'.
One other thing: I must have at least 2 .dsq files in my player.cs script. One for the 'run' (forward) movement and another one for the 'root' (idle) movement. If I dont have any of this files listed in my player.cs file, Torque engine wont run any .dsq files...


Here are some screens shots of what is going on:

This is the character Im playing with...

This is the rig...

This is the hypergraph layout for the character (without sequences)

This is a running pose...(character no properly skinned)

this is the character loaded in TGE...(belive me, its moving!)



Ok with the character for now, I will tweak it later on in this project (Stage 5). Now its time to put some environment in! As soon as Im done with it Ill drop another post (Stage 2 - Environment).