Torque 3D 1.2 - Disembodied Arms

Another week, another Torque 3D 1.2 blog! Last week I showed off some of the objects we have created in Torque 3D 1.2 in my Turrets, Proximity Mines and Teleporters Oh My! blog. If you haven’t read it I would suggest you check it out, I’m proud of what our developers and artists were able to achieve. This week I’ll be showing off one of the larger features that we have worked on for Torque 3D 1.2, a split between first person and 3rd person.

To give you some history on this, several years ago Matt Fairfax and I talked about how difficult it is to get models and animations to look good in first person and third person and how other games and engines have solved that problem. At the time we talked about creating a separation between first person and third person but had to table the discussion. I’m happy to say that thanks to Dave Wyand we’ve finally been able to add that feature to Torque 3D.

Now when you switch into first person we can swap out the weapon model with something optimized for that view. This usually means higher polys and different materials to highlight things on the weapon that would too difficult to see from a distance. We didn’t stop there.





We also decided that we didn’t want to bake the arms into this new first person weapon model. This would have made it difficult to create character variants as we would have had to have very generic arms and hands to ship different first person weapons for each character that could hold it. Instead we added arm bones and animations to the first person weapons, then created a separate first person arm model and gave it the same rig.



Using Dave’s coding magic, when an animation kicks off on the weapon it drives the rig of the first person arm model allowing us to have control over the look and feel of each weapon state and still able to do character variants without adding a ton of additional files and work.

We decided to take things even further and get the third person stuff involved as well. We’ve made some changes so it’s now pretty easy to setup different third person animations for the various weapon holds that we have. Meaning the soldier now has a pistol run, mine run, rifle run etc.



To get everything playing nicely we made it so whatever state the weapon is in controlled the state player was in. So when the player goes to reload in 1st person he reloads in 3rd person as well.

[--- Dave's Tech Talk Corner ---]

Quote:
To make this work the PlayerData and ShapeBaseImageData datablocks have been expanded to include new references to first person shapes. And each now has a pair of animation prefixes used for cross referencing the other when in a 1st or 3rd person view.

For example, you may have a couple of different rifles that use the same 3rd person animation sequences. You give both weapon datablocks an imageAnimPrefix of “rifle”. Now when it comes time to choose the correct sequence for the 3rd person view -- perhaps a fire sequence -- Torque looks for the “rifle_fire” sequence. If that is not found, then the standard “fire” sequence is used instead.

Now in 1st person you want each rifle to operate differently. So you give the first rifle an imageAnimPrefixFP (for first person) of “fancypants” and the second rifle an imageAnimPrefixFP of “superduper”. When the player fires the weapon in 1st person either “fancypants_fire” or “superduper_fire” is used, depending on the rifle. And if either sequence is not found then Torque will use the “fire” fallback sequence.

All of this is data driven and based on what the player is currently holding. And certainly isn’t limited to just weapons. A fairly decent fishing sim could be done with this. :)

[--- Dave's Tech Talk Corner ---]

For all of you that have existing Torque 3D projects, have no fear. We were very careful to make sure that all these new player features played nicely with the current character stuff. That way when/if you decide to take advantage of it you can, otherwise you can ignore it without any effect to your current project or art pipeline.

I’m really excited for this feature set as it allowed our artists to really focus on making things look and feel good. Any feature that allows artists to just be artists is good in my book! This is a special To Be Continued feature so stay tuned for next week when I discuss some of the other improvements we’ve made to the weapon and character.

Torque 3D 1.2 Development Blogs:

• Introduction
• Chinatown
• Turrets, Proximity Mines and Teleporters oh my!
• Disembodied Arms
• Disembodied Arms Continued - Coming Soon!