Any easy way to do person animation with mounts?
by baylor wetzel · in Torque Game Builder · 06/29/2009 (12:48 pm) · 1 replies
i think the answer to my question is "No" but i'll ask the smart people here first
Our current game is a fashion runway game where the player creates their own clothes and a model displays them. While i want people to draw dresses, pants and such, i don't want them to have to draw every frame needed for an animation (left leg forward a little, left leg forward a lot, right hand on hip, etc.). Since it's user content, i can't animate it for them
Right now, the "walk" down the runway is just bobbing side to side ala SouthPark and the photoshoot/pose feature has been removed from the game. Unfortunately, the final game will probably be this
One option is to make them draw the chest, forearm, thigh, calf, etc. separately and manually animate those in my code (ugh!). We haven't done the test yet but the thought is that this will look ugly (specifically at the joints), will make creating clothing harder (especially since there's no easy way to make a drawing program in TGB that can save files, so we're having them use their own editors). Has anyone done anything like this?
One option someone suggested was to write a morph program that generated new images where the legs, arms, etc. were bent. This seems like a lot of work to me and we're a small company so isn't being considered
Another option is to redo that game in 3D. 3D clothes can move and animate just fine. The problem here is that players would need to be 3D modelers and using the standard method of replacing body segments with the clothes, there's no way to wear layers of clothes (i.e., a bra, mesh shirt, sweater and jacket all visible at once)
Someone suggested we force them to use templates/shapes we give them (which i dislike since the focus of the game is creativity) and they just apply a texture but i don't see an easy way to do that in TGB (although i did hear one creative suggestion that the template be an alpha mask, their picture be a floodfill of some texture and you apply the mask in TGB with the source blend option; i haven't tried this yet)
Any other ideas?
Our current game is a fashion runway game where the player creates their own clothes and a model displays them. While i want people to draw dresses, pants and such, i don't want them to have to draw every frame needed for an animation (left leg forward a little, left leg forward a lot, right hand on hip, etc.). Since it's user content, i can't animate it for them
Right now, the "walk" down the runway is just bobbing side to side ala SouthPark and the photoshoot/pose feature has been removed from the game. Unfortunately, the final game will probably be this
One option is to make them draw the chest, forearm, thigh, calf, etc. separately and manually animate those in my code (ugh!). We haven't done the test yet but the thought is that this will look ugly (specifically at the joints), will make creating clothing harder (especially since there's no easy way to make a drawing program in TGB that can save files, so we're having them use their own editors). Has anyone done anything like this?
One option someone suggested was to write a morph program that generated new images where the legs, arms, etc. were bent. This seems like a lot of work to me and we're a small company so isn't being considered
Another option is to redo that game in 3D. 3D clothes can move and animate just fine. The problem here is that players would need to be 3D modelers and using the standard method of replacing body segments with the clothes, there's no way to wear layers of clothes (i.e., a bra, mesh shirt, sweater and jacket all visible at once)
Someone suggested we force them to use templates/shapes we give them (which i dislike since the focus of the game is creativity) and they just apply a texture but i don't see an easy way to do that in TGB (although i did hear one creative suggestion that the template be an alpha mask, their picture be a floodfill of some texture and you apply the mask in TGB with the source blend option; i haven't tried this yet)
Any other ideas?
About the author
Torque Owner Jeffrey Sweeney
So far, it seems the best way is to create child objects (body parts) in code, use the setLinkPoint() function to move the linkpoint of a parent object to different positions, and have the child objects rotate a certain amount depending on the parents frame. Also, when the object flips, body parts (like the arm and legs) need to flip to the back via layer and mountpoint change.
In testing, it's very smooth, but it takes ALOT of time to do. If anyone has found a better solution, I'd love to hear it as well.
If you choose to do this though, here's some tricks I've picked up:
• I used Stykz for animation. Use something like that (or Flash, which is probably better)
• When finding where to mount body parts, use the level editor and add link points to the parent where the joints will be. Then save, open the level data, and copy the parameters into the code.
• Rotation can be 'eyeballed' for the most part, especially if you used a stick person animation.
Hope that helps.