Off Topic Productions

Hey, 'a bomb' is funny 'cos of the animation...

DaveW wrote:A lot of people will be playing DXR anyway, and that won't even use death animations.

...Won't it?

Oh, is that a ragdoll thing?

galmud wrote:DX less than splendid animations never really bothered me that much. Too immersed in the game I guess . Same thing with voice-acting which is really terrible for some characters

Agreed, but then I don't have a problem with the character models or textures, either. I'm one of those apparently rare souls immune to being turned off by old graphics.

Not to say I won't use HDTP or New Vision, especially NV- Despite being immune to being turned off by old graphics, I do quite like high-def textures in newer games.

I quite like high-def textures in older games.

I thought the distributed animation project was finished? Just downloaded the client, keen to help, while catching up on months of not lurking. To my surprise (after reading more) my client is doing stuff. Is it new models or something?

If so, I feel a bit like a last minute soccer substitute scoring a tap-in with my first touch (having had no earlier input)

Edit: Not to overstate my 'contribution'

Probably the new UNACO Trooper model that Phas sent to be animated.

bjorn is one sharp cookie

Cool. I just loaded up the vertex client as well. Letting the Quad Core handle it .

I can't get the client anymore so I can't do anything!

Well the queue is empty now, but just in case the old link still works, it's:

http://www.geocities.com/therocknod97/vertex2client.zip

Yep - queue empty. Jolly good.

Jonas wrote:

metche_steele wrote:People want new models and textures - I don't think it really matters if they still utilise the old animation set.

Hah. Right.

DDL: It's hard for me to find an animation in Deus Ex that I completely like. I think the gestures during conversations are alright, everything else is crap. The death animations manage to stand out as particularly über-terrible and cartoonish, just look at how stiffly a character dies when he falls backwards. All the animations just look a bit stiff and unnatural - cartoonish. If they were to be reworked, you could make it all a bit more "military", but even just making them look more organic would be a great improvement.

Of course I imagine the actual number of animations that the code restricts us to would put a dampener on any such improvements. And clearly we can't mocap anything, but I still think it should be possible to hand-animate something better - more natural.

I totally agree. I'm not much of an character animator (Thats project 3 of the max Fundy class, I'm still on project 2) But it seems to me that if you can rig a character then animating it should not be that hard. I could see why a quick fix would be good for a small team. However the character animations should have some improvements; they look dumb by todays standards. The death animation I don't care too much about because in DX:R it's a fairly organized to take a model and give it Karma physics.

As to the character animations being used for HDTP I was under the impression that the problem lies in that Vertex based animations are impossible to work with, isn't this tool used to to turn the already done bone based animations into vertex animations for HDTP models and also to turn the vertex based DX model animations into bone based for DX:R? Or is everyone saying that no one on the team knows how to do character animations?

Alex? Phasmatis? You guys know how to do character animations, RIGHT!??

Dead-eye wrote:But it seems to me that if you can rig a character then animating it should not be that hard...

I don't like comments like this. If it wasn't hard to do, any old modeller would be able to do it. It isn't easy, you have to know what muscles move when you walk and it isn't just the legs and arms, it's the shoulders, head, neck, pelvis, upper spine etc etc a lot of micro movement is involved, which is difficult.

BTW you realise most games nower days have good animation because it's motion captured not animated by hand.

Animating's easy.
Making animations that are believable and realistic is ridiculously difficult.

Clearly it's time to get a hold of some mocap equipment.

Any suggestions?

Jonas wrote:Clearly it's time to get a hold of some mocap equipment.

Any suggestions?

A box full of Wiimotes.