New ped skeletons/animations

[Errol]

Greetings all!

I've been playing a lot of Borderlands recently and have found it quite difficult not to imagine some of the larger areas as C2 maps. Especially the Sunken Sea area in The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. Anyway, if I were to convert this area I would want to bring the Drifters in too. They're like giant 4 legged spider thingies...

Drifter pic

I'm pretty certain the standard ped skeletons and animations wouldn't cut the mustard for these weird chaps. So, on to the whole purpose of this post...

[tl;dr can start here:]

Has anyone done any work with new skeletons and animations? I've tried searching but nothing much comes up. Possibly Toshiba has done something? All his now-deleted posts taunt me with their hints of secret knowledge.

-Errol

[coffeycup]

Yeah, check with Tosh.

Edit: if you don't have any luck, don't forget about the animations for the aliens. There's a bunch of odd four legged ones. I used one of them for Half Life 2 Dog ped

Btw, his posts were deleted at his request. I didn't want to but he insisted...

[Toshiba-3]

Ped animations are rather easy to achieve in Max2 actually. Well BON files, not SKL ones.

You can get a MAX2+CharStudio+Plugins pack at RR2000.

-The base model must be well prepared as it will be the same for all animations.

-Pivot points (in Max) must be well placed as well. It's difficult to move them afterward.

-Must create the hierarchy of the elements beforehand, keeping in mind what the animations will be.

-When you're ready to assign the bones through the root of the hierarchy, don't check the three IK controllers, and just the three autoboning ones.

-Then, only animate the pivots, don't touch the elements.

-You can only translate the root pivot and its offset will define the speed of movement etc.

-The orientation in max should obviously be the same as in C2/PT2. Having the right size is much recommended.

Been working on a biker ped like 1 or 2 years ago (I already don't remember ), animation was correct and all but it was crashing the game, probably because the hierarchy was too deep. Gotta make tests and all to figure that out. Actually only the watermelon and the cucko I released used "custom" animations.

[Errol]

Cheers for all that Toshiba, very useful information! I can remember exporting a biped animation as a .skl with the plugins back in the day but I didn't do any .bon things.

I've been having a half-arsed play with the .bon file format to see if I could write one myself without 3ds Max 2 and things are going reasonably well. Creating an animation viewer for C2 is currently a "project" but I have more of those than I do... hours in the day?

I'll grab Cucko too, I really enjoyed the watermelon

-Errol