Fauna animations

[Zaggy1024]

Since Blender works for getting animations in the game now, I'm going to start working on making fauna animations.

[infyquest]

It would be great if you could fix the animations for existing animals like zebras, etc

[Erik Johansson]

I'm moving this to Alpha 9 as no one is likely to have the time to look closely at this before the release of Alpha 8 (should be tomorrow), so better give it some more time :)

A general comment: Please focus on animals which currently doesn't have any animations before creating better animations for animals which already have animations. Better that as many animals as possible have animations at all, than that only a few have them but that they have really good ones. I'm not saying you should discard the ones you've already created, just that for the next ones you do it would be of greater value to the project if you focused on animals which doesn't have animations already :)

[Zaggy1024]

The chicken didn't have animations, and if you're talking about the lion animations I did, that was when there weren't any.

[Erik Johansson]

I thought the chicken did have animations :-/ Seems like they don't though, so sorry for that.

[Pureon]

@Zaggy: Great to see you back now that Blender's collada exporter is improved. We definitely need more animal animations.

Could you let us know which animals you are working on beforehand so that there aren't any conflicts? As you know, we have a few other people working on animations too.

[Zaggy1024]

Currently, I've got animations for the chicken, lion/lioness (I realize these have been done already, but they weren't when I made them), boar (might need some work still), and I'll probably work on redoing the fish animations (I hope you don't mind). If you want, you could give me the blend files for the fish animations you've done so I can redo the animations...

[Zaggy1024]

Also, I forgot to mention that I hope to finish a program (for Windows only, I'm pretty awful at any languages other than Visual Studio ones) that can convert a DAE file into a skeleton that can be placed in skeletons.xml, since it's extremely hard to make the skeleton manually...

[michael]

The animations are excellent. One suggestion would be to scale the chicken meshes up slightly (~25%) so they're easier to see. Just slightly larger than real life, but not freakishly so.

[Zaggy1024]

I'll see if I can, but it may be somewhat difficult (the interaction of the model and the skeleton is a bit weird).

[Pureon]

Brilliant work Zaggy. Rather than working on the lion or fish animations now, could you look at sheep, goat, and elephant animations? Most of our animals have no animations, so if you could perhaps work on those first? Up to you.

[Zaggy1024]

Replying to Pureon:

Brilliant work Zaggy. Rather than working on the lion or fish animations now, could you look at sheep, goat, and elephant animations? Most of our animals have no animations, so if you could perhaps work on those first? Up to you.

I've already got an animation set made for the lion, so it wouldn't be any trouble for me to put those in the game and upload them, and if you've already rigged the fish then it wouldn't take long to make new animations for them.

Still, I'm going to be working on all the non-animated ones when I can.

[fcxSanya]

Replying to Zaggy1024:

A converter I wrote in C# to create a skeleton XML set to add to skeletons.xml from a Collada DAE file.

What about the source code/license?)

[Zaggy1024]

Replying to fcxSanya:

What about the source code/license?)

I don't really know anything about licencing, so whatever the game is licenced under... =P

About the source code, I'll post it when I get around to it (it'll include an update, since the one I uploaded will only work the first time you use it since it doesn't make unique IDs).

[Pureon]

Replying to Zaggy1024: Zaggy the new sheep files you've attached above also have the same armature and skeleton problems as before. The skeletons.xml file is missing elements and the collada model's armature still appears to be called 'Armature'. Could you try getting it to work in a local version of 0 A.D. perhaps?

[Zaggy1024]

Sorry about that, it appears I somehow uploaded a different file than the one I was testing... >.<

[Zaggy1024]

Fixed the walk animation so that it was realistic, apparently I animated it incorrectly

[Zaggy1024]

When someone commits this, be sure to do "sheep.zip".

[Kieran P]

Zaggy1024 is now part of the team and able to commit new animations as needed.

Closing this ticket since Fauna animations are coming along nicely.