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| Red Faction : [RED] Tutorials : Character Setup |
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| SKA-Diesel |
  Posted 1st Mar 2007 9:01am |
L4Y Member
Post 661 / 719
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REFERENCE IMAGE
Basic setup for a character using RF Bone
STEP 1
A )
Make your mesh, texture it, then scale it to the correct size. Standard humanoids should be around 1.8m tall (the Z axiz).
You can check this by right clicking your mesh and choosing PROPERTIES.
B )
Once complete, click on Hierarchy tab, AFFECT PIVOT ONLY, CENTRE to OBJECT and ALLIGN to WORLD. When you've done that press the AFFECT PIVOT ONLY button to DE-activate it.
C )
Now go to UTILITIES, RESET X-FORM, then RESET SELECTED.
D )
Now go to the MODIFIER panel, right click on "Xform" and click COLLAPSE ALL. The mesh is now RFbone compatible (read HOPEFULLY  )
After you have reset Xform, you MUST move the mesh to 0,0,0. So select the mesh and change the X, Y and Z co-ordinates to "0.0".
tramsform reference
STEP 2
A )
Make boxes to be your BONES. You should do steps 1 B-D for each bone you create... or if you want the pivot to be OFF CENTRE (for an arm/leg bone for example) simply click AFFECT PIVOT ONLY, move the pivot to where you want it, then complete steps 1 C - D. For the ROOT BONE (labelled 2 in the diagram) do steps 1 B - D.
** the ROOT BONE should normally be around the waist area of your character.
B )
Make a couple of SPINE bones (labelled 3 in the diagram) named "NAME-BDBN-SPINE03" and "NAME-BDBN-SPINE04". Where "NAME" is a 4 letter abbreviation for your characters name.
** Adding SPINE bones lets the game engine BEND the character towards where your first person view is pointing. If your character walks on all legs then you should add "SPINE" to the neck bone name (eg dog1-bdbn-SPINE).
STEP 3
A )
Link your bones together using the SELECT AND LINK tool. When linking bones you are creating a HIERARCHY. The ROOT BONE is at the top of the HIERARCHY, so ultimately all bones are affected by the root bone. Heres an example of the correct HIERARCHY:
hand bone ->lower arm bone ->upper arm bone ->top spine bone ->lower spine bone ->ROOT BONE.
To link bones: With the SELECT AND LINK tool selected click on a bone and hold down the mouse button, move the mouse to the next bone, when the LINK ICON appears release the mouse.
STEP 4
A )
Create DUMMIES (CREATE TAB/ HELPERS BUTTON). Place one DUMMY next to the head bone and LINK it to that bone, then rename the DUMMY to "eye" (green box labelled 5 in diagram). This determines the players first person view height. So again if the character is on all four legs then their view should be lower than a standard human character.
B )
Make another DUMMY and move it to where you want the 3RD PERSON weapons to appear. Link it to the nearest bone; normally the RIGHT HAND BONE. Rename the DUMMY "primary_weapon_1".
At this stage you should now have a character with a bone representing each MOVING part of the body. To test your skeleton simply ROTATE a bone. For example if you rotate the UPPER ARM BONE the lower arm bone and the hand bone should follow. If they DO NOT follow then you're hierarchy is setup incorrectly At this stage the MESH will NOT follow... only the BONES.
To correct mistakes select your "wonky" bone and click the UNLINK SELECTION button (found next the link selection button).
Heres a semi-transparent picture of my character. I've drawn with arrows to show the direction of the hierarchy.
Reference Image 2
STEP 5
A )
Now we must make a keyframe for POSITION and ROTATION for every bone. Go to GRAPH EDITORS/ TRACK VIEW/ OPEN TRACK VIEW.
TRACK VIEW
Click on the filters button, and in the SHOW section untick everything except HIERARCHY, OBJECTS and TRANSFORMS. Then click OK.
It should look like this
B )
Now right click on OBJECTS and choose EXPAND ALL. Now select POSITION for every BONE in the list (ignore the character MESH and any DUMMIES), hold ctrl to select more than one.
Once you have them selected go up to the ASSIGN CONTROLLER button and click it. Choose LINEAR POSITION.
ASSIGN CONTROLLER
Now hit the ADD KEYS button. Go to FRAME ZERO and click to add a key frame, do this for every bone.
When you've added all the POSITION keys, select ROTATION for every bone. With them all selected, again, go to ASSIGN CONTROLLER and choose LINEAR ROTATION. Now add keyframes to frame zero for every bone.
STEP 6 - RF BONE
A )
Select the character mesh. Open the modifier panel, open the modifier list and choose RF_Bone. Now your model has a modifier called Mesh Parameters. Click on ADD BONES. Select all the bones then click ADD. Now there will be a list of the all the bones for the model, with a heading VERTEX WEIGHTS.
It should look like this
B )
The next stage is the most infuriating, and will probably give you a headache.
With your character still selected, select VERTEX under RF_Bone.
Now all the vertices making up your character will be represented by blue crosses.
example
Now try to start with something quite easy like the head or an eyeball (if it has its own bone). For Homer I have a bone for each eyeball, so I can select ALL the vertices representing the the left eye, then find the corresponding bone in the list and change the weight to 100.
For this example you will see that the vertices are between bones, and because this is an organic character we want the arm mesh to bend properly. With all the elbow vertices selected we can add weight (or INFLUENCE) to some bones. As you can see I added 50 to the upper left arm and 50 to the lower left arm, this means both bones will have influence over that area of the arm.
REMEMBER the sum of all the weights for a vertice must add up to 100. So potentially you could have 5 bones affecting one vertice, 4 could be weight 10, and 5th could be 60.
Once you get used to adding weights to the vertices you get used to how much influence should be added to each bone affecting that particular vertice.
TESTING
When you have finished weighting everything SAVE, then reset the scene and open the file again. If you dont do this you wont see the bones affecting the mesh. One at a time select a bone and rotate it, if the mesh deform is good then UNDO and choose another bone and test it. REMEMBER TO UNDO ANY MOVEMENTS YOU MAKE. If any need fixing just select those vertices and re-weight them.
C )
Now add some COLLISION SPHERES. REFERENCE
Rename them as shown, and link them to nearby bones, e.g link "csphere_2" to the head bone.
STEP 7 - EXPORT
A )
Select your character MESH, and click the EXPORT button in the MESH PARAMETERS modifier. Make sure all the DUMMIES and CSPHERES are selected.
Then choose VOLITION CHARACTER MESH FILE (VCM). REFERENCE
NEARLY THERE, NEXT STEP:
CCRUNCH, ANIMATION and MVF REDUCE. |
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Modified Jul 11th, 10:00am by SKA-Diesel |
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| FuryThor |
Posted 1st Mar 2007 3:38pm |
L4Y Member
Post 658 / 831
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Thank you SKA-Diesel for sharing your knowledge in this matter with us.
I really hope that RF is at edge of new era  |
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| Slitzerfest |
Posted 1st Mar 2007 4:11pm |
L4Y Member
Post 76 / 117
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ITS ABOUT TIME someone made a tutorial for characters!
This is almost the same as weapon modelling.
GREAT JOB!!!!  |
Im Back, Im Loaded, And Ready.
RED FACTION HERE I COME. |
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| RF Grim Reaper |
Posted 1st Mar 2007 6:04pm |  |
L4Y Member
Post 550 / 902
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If you think skinning armsets is boring, wait till you do characters. That bits in the 'more to follow' part I'm assuming  |
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| RF Grim Reaper |
Posted 1st Mar 2007 10:30pm | |
L4Y Member
Post 552 / 902
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You can't really just change some filenames in the tables though like you can with weapons, its a little more involved. |
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| FuryThor |
Posted 2nd Mar 2007 8:02am |
L4Y Member
Post 661 / 831
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| Quoting RF Grim Reaper | | You can't really just change some filenames in the tables though like you can with weapons, its a little more involved. |
Yeah and worst what can be done is that you change something, screw that up and game does not give clear error message what is wrong.  So figuring what went wrong can be painful. And in worst case scenario you have to start work from original |
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| RF Grim Reaper |
Posted 2nd Mar 2007 3:55pm | |
L4Y Member
Post 553 / 902
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Thats why I always think it's best to setup a new character from scratch, ie you write virtually every line. Then if something goes wrong you have a rough idea of where it is in the code, well unless its RF just being strange |
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| E_Darkness |
Posted 2nd Mar 2007 10:01pm |
L4Y Member
Post 312 / 338
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Hey this is awesome SKA, I'm going to implement this asap and post the results shortly after.
Someone, if no one then myself, should work on creating a rig exactly identical to a multi player character to experiment with the creation of new 3d person character animations for the default lineup. That masako rig might be the key to, or final product of such a project. |
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| RF Grim Reaper |
Posted 2nd Mar 2007 10:38pm | |
L4Y Member
Post 558 / 902
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The masako rig isn't quite the same as the SP masako, not sure if the MP version is different. Before doing any of my own characters I tried a simple new animation for masako using that rig, it kinda worked but required quite abit of fiddling around (more than I could be bothered to do each time) till it looked the same in max and rf.
I'm wondering if anyone has got other characters, say parker, into max? And not just by remodelling him yourself like with multiplayer armsets |
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| SKA-Diesel |
Posted 3rd Mar 2007 9:00am |
L4Y Member
Post 663 / 719
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OK.. Step 5 has been added.. with a few reference pics.. plus if you go back to step 1 you'll see something VERY important I missed out. Its the bit in yellow.
If anyone has any questions please ask and I'll update accordingly. |
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Modified Mar 3rd, 09:02am by SKA-Diesel |
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