yes, that i-am-a-fighter-and-a-knight-and-a-wizard video works

hahah

great animation. incredibly smooth work, i wish i could rig that well, but im lazy :P

Thats amazing, wonderful work. A hooded robe would look good too.

Great looking model indeed!

If I may make a suggestion, little observation regarding the video:
While the animations look smooth they make little sense from an effective combat point of view.
The wizard has his hand much to high on that staff and ends up in some kind of knot.
Fighting with the staff is, imho, meant to increase the radius of attack/damage and thus the hand should be around the middle of the staff for effective attacking/blocking etc.

What I would really love to see is some animations with only staff as weapon, and some animations only with sword, and of course some with both.
That would offer the possibility to have that wizard in a game with either different techniques or skills which the player has to learn.

Great work indiglow! Keep it up!
Oh and about MED bones: I personally don't mind and think it is best to have bones which are recognized by the engine to be able to use them in C-Script/Lite-C

cheerio
Xarthor

edit: Making the animations looking not like from a pro-fighter is imho not a bad thing. I mean after all this is a wizard and not a champion fighter

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.

Hi, there seems to be two different models at two different skill levels on the wizard, the face is great, has a great texture. But when you compare it to the rest of the model it doesnt fit, did you use a base human mesh made by someone else and just add the robe? I dont mean any offence, I'm just curious.

@indiGLOW:
did you try the fbx file format, which MED can import?
I'm not sure if it supports bones and I don't know if max can export to fbx, but this could be worth a shot.

@ryangregorey:
I guess thats because the face+beard is completely skinned, while the body (robe etc.) is not showing of the final texture afaik.

@Xarthor: Yes max can export FBX and it works perfectly with med.

Yeah ryan, as Xarthor points out, the texture on the head is complete, high rez 512 skin, based on a photoshopped head photo. The rest of the model is skinned using simple 3D paint techniques, except for the underrobes, visible in the front-middle of the wizard robe.

The model is all hand created:

the robes were first made in 3DsMax and then imported into Zbrush2. This enables me to paint detail on to a subdivided mesh. The final mesh is then re-exported over to 3DsMax for rigging.

As the robes should flow more evenly, the mesh is more triangulated than the other body parts.

Here are some screens that better show the topology / poly-structure:





Meanwhile I continue with the fighting animations, I already have some generic walking / running animations built.

Edit: We are actually using the .ASE format, which includes the seperated materials. TBH: I've not experimented with .FBX as I appear to be missing the required max plugs. (Note: Currently only running Max7 at home, can't afford the upgrade at the mo).