character_animations - ryzom/ryzomcore GitHub Wiki

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Added by jay 4 months ago

Hello all,
I'm interested in trying a project with NEL. I got interested and played with OGRE for a while but found there were too many features I wanted missing. It would have required me to almost rewrite it so I gave up.

While learning to animate faces using bones I stumbled on the unreal engine specifications for character animation. Has anyone used them? Are they usable in NEL?

http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/SkeletalSetup.html#Preparing%20a%20Character%20for%20use%20with%20the%20Unreal%20Skeletal%20Animation%20System

Thanks!

I've quickly taken a look at that document.
It shouldn't be a problem for nel to handle those specifications. It's pretty much basic bones and a skin.

You just need to make sure that you're following a few basic rules.
A skeleton must have one and only one root bone (which could logically be placed at 0,0 with no rotation). You can use bones, but also viewport renderable splines or meshes can be used as bones if you want to, bones are pretty much just a visualisation of their transformation (position, rotation and scale).
You'll also need to set the bone controllers to TCB Rotation or Linear Rotation, TCB Position or Linear Position and TCB Scale or Linear Scale. Bezier curves are exported as far as I know, but not yet implemented in the NeL animation system.
For skinning, you can choose between the Physique or Skin modifier, they can both be exported. The Skin modifier is generally easier to use (it doesn't have any special unsupported features) than the Physique modifier.

Thanks for the double check and the tips.
Glad to hear skin is supported. I've never had good luck using physique.
The more I look at NEL the better it looks :)