Thanks for the kind and positive comments.
@Bot190: My intention is to deliver a good set of extras and accessories with the wizard, these are likely to include:
- Head Gear: Hat, Hood, Skull Cap and possibly a Sorcerers Mask
- Equipment: Backpack, Wizard Pouches and a Mage's Spell Book
- Weapons: Basic Staff & Basic Sword - I hope to include a sheathed sword with the equipment pack.
Other items such as rings and smaller items I suspect will be added to the model skins instead of as geom.
Please feel free to suggest other items to include in the above.
@Xarthor: Thanks for the feedback. After posting the video and watching it a few times played back, I burst into laughter at the end. All I could see in my mind, was an old man, desperatly trying to look like he was a martial arts extpert, only to get in something of a twisted knot at the end.
So yes, I totally agree, the actual animation is about as effective a fighting style as flailing your arms wildly in the air might be.
Still the animation itself was very useful to test the rigging and ensure that all the verts are correctly mapped. The high kick certainly stretches the cloak and leg mesh beyond the usual range that will be used when animating this model.
So the upshot is that I am now happy to begin construction of a Gamestudio set of animations.
I've already begun work on some fighting animations and have taken your input directly here. I am presently working on :-
- Attack with Staff Anim 1 (Right Hand Swing)
- Attack with Staff Anim 2 (Right Hand Stab)
- Magic Attack with Staff
- Attack with Sword Anim 1 (Left Hand Swing)
- Attack with Sword Anim 2 (Left Hand Stab)
- Block with Sword (Hold at middle frame for struggle-block)
I will upload some vids of these when completed, hopefully later today
Regarding the bones, I have been giving this much though these past few months, as it means a great deal to our development workflow over at indiglow.co.uk. We certainly wish to support ragdoll, if its simple enough to implement. However we do not like the workflow pipeline in MED for creating animations and especially not for animating complex mesh with bones.
Until such a point as 3DsMax Bones export/import with MED are supported (Which I doubt we will ever see) we are aiming to generate a large percentage of the animations with more traditional mesh animation. Using Max rigging to generate the mesh transforms and exporting/importing them in MED.
However we would then need to include Bones rigging, if we want to have ragdoll or any kind of IK footplanting in our game.
So how we achieve this is yet to be proven, hence the generation of this wizard model.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.