Well I’m not totally happy with the results (some of the vertex weights are screwy and I’m finding it devilishly hard to fix them … the vertex weight tool needs work, I think) but I have a complete workflow for animation from Cheetah3d to Unity3d (well – except for UV mapping, which I have not played with yet). So, it really looks like Cheetah3D + Unity3D + 2D Paint Program (e.g. Photoshop or GIMP) is a complete game production pipeline for under $500 (plus whatever Adobe gouges you for :-/).
(You may need to download the Unity3d Web Player plugin. The link should appear automatically if needed.)
From the Unity side, everything works flawlessly. Cheetah3d 4.0 has just come out, and its character animation tools need a little refinement, but as far as I can tell there’s no issue that can’t be fixed with Cheetah3d as it is (just a little painfully).
Hey good one man. I see what you mean by the weighting, between the legs…I generally(with maya) have the most issues under the arms…
Charge on!
AC
PS Its nice to see an animal with the weapon-one of the things I hate about Halo is that the enemies (grunts in particular) are depicted as animal like. I actually like animals, and think it really sucks that companies as big as microshaft see it as appropriate to subvertly sow the seeds of hate towards cute fuzzies into young players…
But thats just what I think and Im entitled to an opinion…[/quote]
looks pretty nice, only critique i can come with is that it looks like he kicks bakcwards a bit to much when lifting his feet, and the tail could use a bit more swinging from side to side when he walks.
haha that’s cool - it really does look like he’s clapping when in a head-on view. glad to hear this workflow is doable. some of the transitions are a bit off, the jump from standing position has a little double take to it, but overall a good start ; )
I’ve completely redone the breathing (idle) cycle – which fixes (er … avoids) most of the leg issues and the transition problems. I agree the walk cycle needs tweaking, but that will probably be ignored for now – I don’t want to get tied up being a perfectionist (as usual :-/ ).
I’m having a terrible time with Cheetah’s UV unwrap function (it seems pretty much useless, but it’s probably me) which leaves me with the rather horrible prospect of exporting the mesh, texturing it in Blender or Wings3d, and then redoing the weights. Not a very good workflow :-/
I may just use flat colors on everything but simple meshes and wait for Cheetah to grow better UV tools (or me to figure out what my malfunction is). Flat colors actually suit the style.
As for animals with guns: I’m planning the animals in space suits to all be good guys, while humans, aliens, and robots will be both good and evil – for EXACTLY the reasons you’re giving.
Thanks for posting this, podperson; inspires me to continue in Cheetah. You’re right about the weight painting; on complex geometry it gets very hard to control. If you could constrain the weight painting to an assigned vertex group instead of the whole model, it would help, but I don’t think that’s possible now.
Cheetah’s UV mapping is confusing to me as well. UVMapper looks cool, but only accepts *.obj if read correctly, and you want a way to tweak the UVs after the rig is in place, 'cause you can’t transfer weights and rig to another model. And until you start rigging and animating, it’s hard to know exactly where the UVs need to be.
I actually managed to deal with the UV Unwrap tool in Unity. Blender has a good UV mapping function iirc. (Of course, Blender is such a PITA to use that it may not be worth the bother.)
Cheetah3D uses LSCM unwrapping which is probably the best unwrapping algorithm available today. Most other 3D apps support LSCM today too.
But LSCM is only a semi-automatic algorithm and still requires to set seams and pinned vertices correctly. With badly set seams and pinned UV’s you will also get a bad unwrapping with overlappings. But with some experince it is quite easy to set seams and pinned UV’s correctly.
So theoretically the result of all apps which use LSCM should be very similar when using the same seams and pinned UV’s. Differences are probably just caused by some differences in the implementation.
In v4.1 the weight painting will already become easier. I’ve added a new painting mode which should help.
But from my own experience with other 3D apps, weight painting is the most difficult job of the whole rigging/skinning process. So it will be probably always a little bit tricky.
Sorry Martin – no discredit intended to Cheetah3d.
I think my unwrapping issue isn’t with the unwrapping of the individual face groups (which is fine) but the fact they all seem to end up on top of each other, and quibbles with the UI for manipulating the groups afterwards. These are just quibbles, however.
Vertex weighting is just a sucky process … no doubt about it. 3d Studio Max has incredibly sophisticated tools for vertex weighting (each bone has editable cylinders attached and you can interactively size them and watch vertices light up yada yada) and despite all of that I think it’s easier to rig in Cheetah than 3DS Max.
So … any criticism I have of Cheetah is hardly an endorsement of its more expensive and generally less usable rivals
I would make him hold his weapon out more when firing. And also if this is going to be 3rd person, you will probably want a non scoped firing animation because I would think that when you scope in you won’t be seeing yourself.
Just a thought, I don’t know how you want your game to be.
I’m having problems with layering the shooting animation. I manually removed all the leg and hip keys, but when I “layer” the firing animation it takes over the whole model. So now I only let him fire when standing (fair enough – it’s not like you can walk around at full speed while using a scope).
The gun isn’t final – I literally tossed it together in about 5 minutes. So I’ll probably move the scope forward. I also don’t want to have to do two different animations – one for when his helmet is on (and the rifle is inside the helmet at the moment).
I’ll probably give him a shoot from the hip animation eventually.
All kinds of interesting issues. But the main thing is the important part of the workflow is all good, which means I need to do some hard work…
