2011-01-10, 02:17 AM
Som .mdl files have two types of animation (as I've explained before) which are probably mutually exclusive. Of course no software you can find (other than x2mdo) will write any graphics files that are natively supported by Som.
I dunno what Blender's capabilities are, though I'd be shocked if they did not include all traditional methods widely used for animation. You might have to switch over to the "Game" mode as ML described, because real-time animation and CGI animation are kinda different problem domains.
The more sophisticated animation type x2mdl does not yet do. I'm not sure what ML means by "frame based" but I will call it frame based... which is based on Quake .mdl files I believe, though the "mdl" part is probably only a coincidence. Basically that's like you just take a snapshot of the model at each frame of the animation and then play it back. Like a movie more or less. I call this "scarecrow" animation, and I'm sticking to that to avoid confusion, because the models you can make this way move like scarecrow (in The Wizard of Oz)
Anyway, that's the kind of animation you don't want at this point. The other kind is what I call "tinman" animation. It moves like suit of armor, ie. is not flexible. This kind of animation works by moving the joints of the animation which are arranged in the shape of a "skeleton". When the joints move, all the parts of the model that are stuck to that joint move in exactly the same way, and so do all the parts that are stuck to the joints that are further down the skeleton tree.
Ideally that's the kind of animation you want for now to work with x2mdl. The bone/skin animation is really just a variation of the classical skeletal animation model where each vertex is weighted against a number of joints (now called bones for the hell of it) so if you set the weights to for each sub-mesh to all on or off you end up with what is essentially a tinman animation. It would still look like bone/skin to x2mdl but I can add some code to accept it anyway as long as the weights are appropriate.
As soon as x2mdl can write out scarecrow models I will adapt it to work with bone/skin input by virtue of simply sampling the bone/skin animation at regular or adaptive intervals. I actually know pretty much everything about the scarecrow layouts, but I need to setup a visualizer so I can confirm the code is correct. Ideally something more efficient than using Som itself to that end. I think will probably add some code to Ex for drawing scarecrow models sometime in the next year so I can add an avatar to Trismegistus based on the npc Tom picked out for the player, which I'm pretty sure is a scarecrow animation.
PS: The tinman models are actually much more efficient and will be easier to optimize in the future. So even after scarecrow models are an option, I encourage you to stick to the tinman layouts if you can. Especially for monster hordes. At some point it will probably be practical to add vertex weights to the tinman npcs via Ex. Or probably more practically just replace the "skin" part of the model so the joints would be more one piece like than two overlapping stubs.
PPS: I'd be surprised if you couldn't buy a legal version of Maya for around 250$ for what you want to do, but I recommend just sticking with Blender even if the UI is a bit heavy handed. Same for GIMP versus Photoshop. I often feel like GIMP just won't do what I need it to, but eventually I figure out how to do it. The filters though can seem a bit limited. I have not tried really looking for filter plugins though. And hell I could probably write my own if I wanted to after adapting GIMP's pseudo antialias filter for Ex a little while back (which Ex is not currently use) to try to smooth out the edges of knocked out pixels a little better (I think a true AA algorithm is necessary... unfortunately I did not find one just laying around)
I dunno what Blender's capabilities are, though I'd be shocked if they did not include all traditional methods widely used for animation. You might have to switch over to the "Game" mode as ML described, because real-time animation and CGI animation are kinda different problem domains.
The more sophisticated animation type x2mdl does not yet do. I'm not sure what ML means by "frame based" but I will call it frame based... which is based on Quake .mdl files I believe, though the "mdl" part is probably only a coincidence. Basically that's like you just take a snapshot of the model at each frame of the animation and then play it back. Like a movie more or less. I call this "scarecrow" animation, and I'm sticking to that to avoid confusion, because the models you can make this way move like scarecrow (in The Wizard of Oz)
Anyway, that's the kind of animation you don't want at this point. The other kind is what I call "tinman" animation. It moves like suit of armor, ie. is not flexible. This kind of animation works by moving the joints of the animation which are arranged in the shape of a "skeleton". When the joints move, all the parts of the model that are stuck to that joint move in exactly the same way, and so do all the parts that are stuck to the joints that are further down the skeleton tree.
Ideally that's the kind of animation you want for now to work with x2mdl. The bone/skin animation is really just a variation of the classical skeletal animation model where each vertex is weighted against a number of joints (now called bones for the hell of it) so if you set the weights to for each sub-mesh to all on or off you end up with what is essentially a tinman animation. It would still look like bone/skin to x2mdl but I can add some code to accept it anyway as long as the weights are appropriate.
As soon as x2mdl can write out scarecrow models I will adapt it to work with bone/skin input by virtue of simply sampling the bone/skin animation at regular or adaptive intervals. I actually know pretty much everything about the scarecrow layouts, but I need to setup a visualizer so I can confirm the code is correct. Ideally something more efficient than using Som itself to that end. I think will probably add some code to Ex for drawing scarecrow models sometime in the next year so I can add an avatar to Trismegistus based on the npc Tom picked out for the player, which I'm pretty sure is a scarecrow animation.
PS: The tinman models are actually much more efficient and will be easier to optimize in the future. So even after scarecrow models are an option, I encourage you to stick to the tinman layouts if you can. Especially for monster hordes. At some point it will probably be practical to add vertex weights to the tinman npcs via Ex. Or probably more practically just replace the "skin" part of the model so the joints would be more one piece like than two overlapping stubs.
PPS: I'd be surprised if you couldn't buy a legal version of Maya for around 250$ for what you want to do, but I recommend just sticking with Blender even if the UI is a bit heavy handed. Same for GIMP versus Photoshop. I often feel like GIMP just won't do what I need it to, but eventually I figure out how to do it. The filters though can seem a bit limited. I have not tried really looking for filter plugins though. And hell I could probably write my own if I wanted to after adapting GIMP's pseudo antialias filter for Ex a little while back (which Ex is not currently use) to try to smooth out the edges of knocked out pixels a little better (I think a true AA algorithm is necessary... unfortunately I did not find one just laying around)