Animation Help!
It's me again ^^ I'd been modeling this character for an open-source project. I'm also working on other project as well, since it will licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 anyway, I hope for a collaboration to finish her up and to study others animation technique. It is rigged and ready for animation but feel free to re-rig her cause mine wasn't that good anyway. I also had optimised her mesh but you might find her skirt to be somewhat tricky to get it right.
The Character
By the time I wrote this, I had not given her a name, I just called her Red Riding Reaper for fun sake. Prior to the game, she was just a coward and timid little girl who had lost her only family she had, her aunt to the werewolves. She were saved by a Woodchopper who happen to be a Werewolves Hunter. The man teaches her how to fight and send her off to defend a town threaten by a Lycan Lord and his army of werewolves. This is where the game start. She is still a timid and coward girl in the first half of the game but eventually grown up to be a great Hunter on her own.
I'm requesting for the basic animation:
1. Idle (with a scythe)
2. Run forward + backward + side (ready to fight)
3. Jump
4. Melee Attack (with scythe) at around 2- 3 attack type
optional:
5. Ranged Attack (with a gun/pistol)
6. Spell Casting (anyway you can think with her left hand while holding her scythe on the right)
7. Dead & Dying (yeah that's two)
The Game
The engine I mentioned is this https://github.com/hirato/lamiae . It was an engine built to be a specificly for RPG game like Elder Scroll and Fallout series. What I'm trying to do now is trying to break the mould by creating a game that is not the genre the engine was built upon. The wiki contain enough technical specificationabout the engine https://github.com/hirato/lamiae/wiki .
It's demo for the engine debut, I'm planning to have Hack n Slash mixed with Tower Defense and Wave Survival. There will be werewolves that you had to fight in waves before you you can proceed to next stage. The theme is based on Red Riding Hood twisted fairytale, this is when the girl learn to fight her way to conquer her own feeling, from a coward and timid to brave and strong story.
I opted for a stylized Artstyle of the TLOZ Skyward Sword game as a reference for artstyle. What I mean by it were handpainted texture, abstract style environment.Much like this one project of mine
Note: Still in development and yeah made with Lamiae.
The atmosphere of the game changes from being a gloomy at the start and will became a little brighter as she gain more courage in the middle of the game but fall into desperation at the end of the game. I guess the ending should be kept secret for now :P .
The engine will be release after we have finish this Demo. We had no deadline when because we just sort of work on our own pace. But I guess I could say I need to finish this model by the end of this month. 20th of May sound realistic enough. You can update your work in this thread.
My Role
I'm volunteering for the project cause it's fun as an Artist, I'm handling the Artstyle design, the environment, the character design and much more for this project. It's fun but I might need some help here and there. Since it is an Open-source project, I guess it is right to request help here.
Well I'm working oon my own project too so that's another reason ^^"
Thanks you if you want to volunteer and help me out with this one. I'll be sure to find you again if I had any project that I can pay for in the future.
Red.blend 4.3 Mb [5 download(s)] Scythe2.blend 751.9 Kb [2 download(s)]
You have asked poorly.
Animators are like actors, in order to give a good performance they need to know their character, their part on the stage, and their part of the stage. You have not covered these particularly well and in so doing tied the hands of anyone who wants to help.
The following things are very useful:
* What project is this for?
* Who is the character that you need animated?
* What is the direction of the game? (Cartoony/Realistic, Violent/Peacefull, etc.)
* Are their any events that would affect how characters act?
* What are the technical limitations for the project? (Often it is best to point to your engine's documentation or ask the lead programmer.)
* When will the project be considered done?
* What resources are available to the artist?
* When do you need it by?
* How do you need updated on progress?
==================================================
I think you did a great job on the model by the way. The only concerns I have are that:
* The scarf is made up of single sided quads. This will cause problems if backface culling is used.
* You IK rigged the arms. FK makes animating the arms more tedious, but a lot easier to make look natural. (FK rigged fingers are probably not worth it.)
* The IK rigging on the legs is tied to the shins. Ideally the IK control point is on the bottom of the feet so you can easily place the character's feet on the ground.
* You are missing grip bones in both your characters hands and on the weapon.
* You have a high number of bones (72). One engine I have read up on looses the ability to use hardware acceleration for your character if your character has more than 75. I would recommend getting rid of the palm.01 - palm.04 L/R bones and the heel.02.L/R bones. I feel they are not helping much if at all.
Good luck on your projects, I hope this helped.
==================================================
P.S. Have you heard of Blender's UV Project Modifier?
http://www.blender.org/manual/modifiers/modify/uv_project.html
If combined with a clever set up this can make for some very convincing anime style eyes. I have doubts about it's portability though.
@Saliv thanks for your comment, I had updated the post with more info than before. As of the model,
* It is intended to have a one sided since the engine allow everymodel to have its own configuration. Backface culling included. I can turn it off for this model only but it can turn it on on other. I wanted so that I don't have to use much verts on the scarf. Well it will weird anyway if I had double sided the scarf cause it is made out of alpha blended texture.
*It look natural I guess. I tried to use copy bone rotation constraint on the fingers but it doesn't work out the way I wanted to. Any suggestion on that fingers?
*The engine allow that many bones, It didn't have limit on bone numbers but I had fixed the armature as you suggested.
=======================
Never heard of that feature before but we always found new things to do with Blender everyday anyway :D For now I had few solution for the eyes but since I can't import modifiers into most game engine, I kept for making animations.
Would you be able to export these as fbx? My program doesn't read blend files. I could probably do a run animation.
I'll try but I don't know if it will work or the IK will be preserve after export. But I guess you can re-rig it anyway right. What are you using? Maya?
Ah, that might be an issue. fbx seems to export ok with Maya, but I'm not sure about how it works with blender. Yes, I'm using Maya.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1jt5gi5bdy1ufda/Red_FBX.zip?dl=0
Thanks for helping. That is the link to the fbx but you had been warned, thing might break, at least the IK I guess.
Aw... It imported the joints, but not any controls (if it had any controls?). I'll play with it, but I make no guarantees.
Edit: I'm sorry. Looks like I won't be able to do anything with it without re-rigging it.
Are you still looking for an animator? Blender is my native 3D program and I'm looking to animate some work in it to add to my reel/portfolio. Since the poster before me didn't use Blender did you still need an animator? I just found the forum today and I'm not sure how good it is about notifying me of responses so shoot me a message at AvidsArt at Gmail.com if you're still looking for someone.
Here's my current reel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE-z04bx2n8
I'm only interested in character animation, no modeling/rigging/texturing/weighting/lighting etc so this sounds like a good project that isn't TOO huge. :D
www.TaintedEnterprises.com
Yes @AvidLebon, I'll be glad if you wanted to help. You don't have to worry about other thing, just the animation. I'll be handling exporting the character to the engine when it's ready. If you need more detail just tell me.
If you can teach me how to export the animation properly, I'll give it a go, since I already use and prefer Blender and it'd give me a chance to try animation with someone else's rig. What animations still remain to be done?
I think I've got the girl character animation. It'd probably be a bad idea (and kind of rude) to split up the animation of a single character between two animators who likely have very different styles. Maybe he'll need animation for other elements, such as the werewolves and other npcs/enimies later? Then I think it would be a good idea to split up the tasks of animating different characters IMHO. I don't think delegation by character would be a bad thing since the characters should move uniquely anyway.
www.TaintedEnterprises.com
@AvidLeon: Very well, that's probably smart.
@OP: If that open-source project ever needs another animation, feel free to send me an email, as I tend to like to do these kinds of things for fun, and I need a larger portfolio just in case indie development doesn't work out for me. I'm "therealgravitygames" on gmail (lack of at sign to hopefully avoid bot spam).
@GravityGames I have werewolves that need to be animate but I need a few more days to set him up cause I lost the source file with rig a few days ago with my thumbdrive. I'll get into the case right away ^^
Looks like your project is gaining some attention now. Good luck!