Ecstasy Dev Blog #4: FBX, default.cfg, GA, and more...
by Chris Calef · 09/24/2009 (1:49 pm) · 8 comments
Hey, Garage Gamers! It's been a while since Ecstasy Motion popped its head up over here, so I thought I should catch people up. Life has been insanely busy ever since (and before) SIGGRAPH,
both with end-of-the-summer real-life things to do and fun to have, which all had to wait until the SIGGRAPH adventure was concluded... but now, Ecstasy Development is marching on! (Find this original dev blog here.)
Some of these are still in the dev repo only, pending final QA, but recent improvements include:
1) FBX output (still needs to be tested in Maya & other programs, but I'm saving anims out to FBX format now, see this thread) Adding the FBX library means more than just FBX, as well - this means we can also save out animations to Collada, as well as several other Autodesk-associated formats.
2) default.cfg automation - we're finally getting rid of the insanely complicated "default.cfg process" required to import your own model into Ecstasy. Not finished with that yet but at this point we do have a little retargeting plugin that assists you in connecting the nodes and creating your default.cfg file, and then we have a function in Ecstasy that adds its best guess as to the set of rotations necessary to convert the bvh sequences to a dsq (Torque animation file) for this model.
(This step has been a thorn in our side ever since I first wrote the BVH import resource. Turns out getting everybody into a T Pose facing the right direction and then solving for each bodypart's local rotations automatically wasn't as easy as it sounds.) :-|
3) GA system update & tutorial (because somebody asked). I realize this one is more of a "fun project" for me than a useful tool for animators right now... but it was only a day or so and somebody did ask! :-) (see this thread.)
4) GUI revamp. I've started in on the new GUI we've been promising since EA release. At the beginning I couldn't really do this because we didn't even know what features were going to end up in the final program... and then preparation for mocap demo at SIGGRAPH took over squeakiest wheel position until that was over... and since then I've just been scrambling to hit the worst brush fires while also paying the rent - so, sorry changes on some of these things have taken so long!) But anyway, on the GUI, expect a look much more similar to the Torque World Editor (or Endorphin), with dropdown menus and icons across the top and free floating timeline, scene tree and properties/inspector windows, dockable to the sides and each other.
For 1.0 changes, the list is too long to go into full detail, but besides the above changes, we also expect to:
* port up to T3D 1.0, YAAAAAYY!!! :D This should dramatically increase performance (the 1.0 demo about doubled framerate on my machine, over the older beta versions) and fix a number of annoying little GUI bugs, and I'm sure other things I haven't even noticed yet.
* do another pass on the main physics set up for the ACK characters, and most importantly expose the datablocks through T3D's new datablock editor, so they are much easier for the final user (non-scripter) to make modifications. But yes, the Ecstasy ragdoll physics are still a little twitchy, I apologize. Other possibilities for improvement include: a) adding back in the functionality of simply freezing prone instead of getting up, when movement drops below the Sleep Threshold, so they don't have to sit there and vibrate, b) plugging in Bullet as well as PhysX for the underlying physics, to see if we can get better joint performance - my system has physics engine abstracted out pretty well so it shouldn't be that huge of a job.
* take another pass on Playbots (multiple actor scene management) to make it much easier to add bots of different types to a scene and tell them what to do.
* improved support for physics event and motor force scripting through the regular GUI, so you can easily tell the actors when and where and how hard to get hit, and what other actions you want them to do, either on a global scene timeline or relative to a specific animation.
* camera control - make orbit-style camera around the selected character rather than having to run around as a game character (again, [glow=red,2,300]sorry[/glow], moving as fast as we can here!)
The list could go on, but I think this is most of what we have planned. (Don't hold me to it, there are probably things I'm forgetting right now - if you don't see your core feature on the list, reply here!) Also targeting Mac and Linux releases, but probably slightly post-1.0 release for Windows, not before.
Cheers, and happy devving!
Chris Calef
Ecstasy Lead Dev
both with end-of-the-summer real-life things to do and fun to have, which all had to wait until the SIGGRAPH adventure was concluded... but now, Ecstasy Development is marching on! (Find this original dev blog here.)
Some of these are still in the dev repo only, pending final QA, but recent improvements include:
1) FBX output (still needs to be tested in Maya & other programs, but I'm saving anims out to FBX format now, see this thread) Adding the FBX library means more than just FBX, as well - this means we can also save out animations to Collada, as well as several other Autodesk-associated formats.
2) default.cfg automation - we're finally getting rid of the insanely complicated "default.cfg process" required to import your own model into Ecstasy. Not finished with that yet but at this point we do have a little retargeting plugin that assists you in connecting the nodes and creating your default.cfg file, and then we have a function in Ecstasy that adds its best guess as to the set of rotations necessary to convert the bvh sequences to a dsq (Torque animation file) for this model.
(This step has been a thorn in our side ever since I first wrote the BVH import resource. Turns out getting everybody into a T Pose facing the right direction and then solving for each bodypart's local rotations automatically wasn't as easy as it sounds.) :-|
3) GA system update & tutorial (because somebody asked). I realize this one is more of a "fun project" for me than a useful tool for animators right now... but it was only a day or so and somebody did ask! :-) (see this thread.)
4) GUI revamp. I've started in on the new GUI we've been promising since EA release. At the beginning I couldn't really do this because we didn't even know what features were going to end up in the final program... and then preparation for mocap demo at SIGGRAPH took over squeakiest wheel position until that was over... and since then I've just been scrambling to hit the worst brush fires while also paying the rent - so, sorry changes on some of these things have taken so long!) But anyway, on the GUI, expect a look much more similar to the Torque World Editor (or Endorphin), with dropdown menus and icons across the top and free floating timeline, scene tree and properties/inspector windows, dockable to the sides and each other.
For 1.0 changes, the list is too long to go into full detail, but besides the above changes, we also expect to:
* port up to T3D 1.0, YAAAAAYY!!! :D This should dramatically increase performance (the 1.0 demo about doubled framerate on my machine, over the older beta versions) and fix a number of annoying little GUI bugs, and I'm sure other things I haven't even noticed yet.
* do another pass on the main physics set up for the ACK characters, and most importantly expose the datablocks through T3D's new datablock editor, so they are much easier for the final user (non-scripter) to make modifications. But yes, the Ecstasy ragdoll physics are still a little twitchy, I apologize. Other possibilities for improvement include: a) adding back in the functionality of simply freezing prone instead of getting up, when movement drops below the Sleep Threshold, so they don't have to sit there and vibrate, b) plugging in Bullet as well as PhysX for the underlying physics, to see if we can get better joint performance - my system has physics engine abstracted out pretty well so it shouldn't be that huge of a job.
* take another pass on Playbots (multiple actor scene management) to make it much easier to add bots of different types to a scene and tell them what to do.
* improved support for physics event and motor force scripting through the regular GUI, so you can easily tell the actors when and where and how hard to get hit, and what other actions you want them to do, either on a global scene timeline or relative to a specific animation.
* camera control - make orbit-style camera around the selected character rather than having to run around as a game character (again, [glow=red,2,300]sorry[/glow], moving as fast as we can here!)
The list could go on, but I think this is most of what we have planned. (Don't hold me to it, there are probably things I'm forgetting right now - if you don't see your core feature on the list, reply here!) Also targeting Mac and Linux releases, but probably slightly post-1.0 release for Windows, not before.
Cheers, and happy devving!
Chris Calef
Ecstasy Lead Dev
#2
Any chance of anybody out there running Max or Maya who wants to help us fine tune the FBX output? See above mentioned thread for some sample files you can check out. I think the guy is facing the wrong way, let me know if there's anything else you see, or if there could be more useful node names, etc.
09/24/2009 (4:21 pm)
Very good chance of FBX import - didn't make it in the first pass, but since FBX carries its own load functions it would be darn easy to add it.Any chance of anybody out there running Max or Maya who wants to help us fine tune the FBX output? See above mentioned thread for some sample files you can check out. I think the guy is facing the wrong way, let me know if there's anything else you see, or if there could be more useful node names, etc.
#3
09/24/2009 (4:58 pm)
Nice. Looking forward to the retargetting plugin.
#4
09/24/2009 (5:17 pm)
Cool, looking forward to getting it into your hands! 
#6
09/24/2009 (11:30 pm)
good stuff, cant wait for the new updates, getting better and better. hope to see the new tutorials completed soon. thanks brokeass. 
#7
10/10/2009 (4:53 pm)
Can I get a link to Ecstasy please? I'm writing up a funding proposal and need the price and the "new and improved" GG search tool doesn't include products in it's search results apparently. Thanks for all the awesome work you guys are doing for Torque developers!
Associate OmegaDog
Rock on BAG!