lara croft model problem
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Beginners Area/lara croft model problem
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| hi i got the real lara croft model off tomb raider and am having problems animation it in blitz i'm not going to sell anything i do with it of give it to anyone else but can someone help me cause it's in .3ds format and i cant get it to animate. please help goober |
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| If it's in .3ds format it isn't animated. .3ds doesn't support proper bones animation or vertex animation, it only supports hierarchical ( segmented ) animation and I'm certain they didn't model Lara Croft with hierarchical animation. |
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| "I'm certain they didn't model Lara Croft with hierarchical animation" -- They did in the first couple of games. Load the mesh using the 'loadanimmesh' command and then animate using 'animate'
lara=loadanimmesh("lara.3ds")
animate lara
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| "I'm certain they didn't model Lara Croft with hierarchical animation" They did in the first couple of games. Load the mesh using the 'loadanimmesh' command and then animate using 'animate' Really? They did a damn good job of hierarchical animation then. Probably the best I've seen. |
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| http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Pagoda/2556/2l_c0012.html http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Pagoda/2556/2l_c0007.html These are screens from tomb raider 2. The joints are quite obvious |
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| Seriously though. No offense to the developers of the first "Tomb Raider" games (they were working with the technology of the time after all) but the hierarchical animation in "Tomb Raider" is some of the WORST I've ever seen. Sybixsus, I can only assume you haven't played many 3D games from the Playstation era. |
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| Actually, having seen those screenshots, I'm beginning to think I never played Tomb Raider 1 or 2 on the PC at all. In fact, Joe, I had a Playstation so I wasn't playing many PC games. With a games console the resolution is so low ( tv's blur things quite a bit too ) that it's pretty hard to tell. Most of the games I was playing were using 2d character graphics. Lots of games like Breath of Fire 3 & 4, Persona 2, Saga Frontier, all that stuff. |
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| SaGa Frontier. Now that was a cool game, and hard. |
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| Sybixsus: Sybixsus, I can only assume you haven't played many 3D games from the Playstation era. He didn't mention PC games anywhere - just the word playstation. Blimey - im turning into an argumentative git aint i lol ignore me i need beer. |
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| @jhocking n everybody else. Im not a TR Fan but i did have a voodoo back in tha day and TR looked waaaaayyy better then on the screenshots.... |
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| Yeah it did - tomb raider looked amazing in its day. I remember the dinosaur on the second level made me jump the first time i came face to face with it - no game has managed to do that since. |
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| It's a shame now that Tomb Raider still makes me want to jump, but of a different kind. |
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| Ravey : I mentioned PC games because the screenshots appeared to be from the PC version, and because the PC version would be far, far easier to spot the kind of obvious joints that show up in the screenshots shown. I sit about 2ft away from my sharp pixelly 17" monitor and at least 3x as far away from my blurry pixelly tv. At that distance all I could expect to see was the quality of the actual movement ( which was very good. ) Visual artifacts such as those ugly joints wouldn't have shown up. And since many of the games I was playing at the time were 2d, they didn't have any joints at all. I don't think I had a clue what kind of animation a PSX would have been doing anyway, so I wouldn't have known how to compare. That's all. |
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| "i did have a voodoo back in tha day and TR looked waaaaayyy better then on the screenshots" I think you're succumbing to nostalgia. Graphics on a Voodoo (I'm talking about Voodoo 1; I assume that's what you mean too) were pathetic, only marginally better than software rendering. Note that I'm not saying this makes "Tomb Raider" a bad game (I thought it was awesome,) just don't kid yourself about the graphics quality. I was talking about the PC version too actually. I said "Playstation era," not just "Playstation." Referring to PSX helped identify what time period I was talking about (to avoid confusion I suppose I should have said "Tomb Raider era".) In later PSX games soft-skin animation of a continuous mesh was used but earlier games were all heirarchy animated. For example compare FF7 to FF8. The best example I can think of of good heirarchy animation is "Metal Gear Solid." Konami did a pretty good job of disguising the joints; it mostly had to do with the shading of the segments where they overlap. |
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| i tried the animate command but it doesn't work cause nothing shows unless you put the following: lara=LoadAnimMesh( "Lara skin.3ds" ) ;anim seq 0 LoadAnimSeq lara,"lara.3ds but even then when it show the model it still doesn't animate. please help goober |
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| The problem is obviously either just the specific models you are using or your code. I'ld have to see the models directly in order to know which to load and play. Meanwhile since you haven't posted the code you are using to play the animation it is entirely possible you are simply using the Animate command incorrectly. The most common mistake I see is to call Animate every frame; the command is designed to only be called once when you start playing an animation and then use UpdateWorld every frame to increment playback. |
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| well if you send me an e-mail by clicking on my name in one of the mesages i did above and i can send the model to you. |
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| Or you could save a step and email me. Make sure to send it as a .zip file. |
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| @jhocking > I had a Voodoo 2 Banshee > no nostalgia, but the gfx where waaaay better then on the scr shots. |
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| There's little point arguing since it is mostly a matter of opinion but I'm curious what exactly you recall it looking like. Since we can't take a screenshot of your memory (how cool would that be?) let's try to describe things in words. The most significant things I see which make the graphics crappy are: the obvious joints between segments (which is due to modeling and thus looks the same on all hardware) the boring, repetitive, colorless background (which is due to the textures used and thus looks the same on all hardware) the extreme pixelation of the background textures (which is due to the lack of anti-aliasing on older hardware; that feature wasn't developed until after VooDoo3) Were these things not true for you? |
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| ok jhocking i've sent the email. please update as soon as possible. goober |
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| Wow, those models are seriously messed up. Just look at the textures; the artist who created that had no idea what he was doing (every single polygon of the character is on a separate, random part of the texture.) Plus pieces of the model are in separate places (as in all the overlapping polygons are in a separate 3ds file from the rest of the model,) not to mention most of those 3ds files aren't animated. One, lara.3ds, is actually completely empty; no geometry at all! There is significant cleanup (combining meshes, assigning correct textures, etc.) if you actually intend to use these but the code below does achive a walking Lara Croft by loading up a non-animated mesh and applying the animation from another file: Graphics3D 640,460,0,2 SetBuffer BackBuffer() timer=CreateTimer(50) camera=CreateCamera() CameraRange camera,100,3000 PositionEntity camera,0,350,-1500 RotateEntity camera,10,0,0 light=CreateLight() RotateEntity light,10,10,0 AmbientLight 64,64,64 lara=LoadAnimMesh("lara skin.3ds") EntityColor lara,255,255,255 EntityShininess lara,.2 RotateEntity lara,0,130,0 LoadAnimSeq(lara,"lara2.3ds") While Not KeyDown(1) WaitTimer(timer) If KeyHit(200) Animate lara,1,1,1,10 If Not KeyDown(200) Animate lara,0,1,0,5 If KeyDown(203) TurnEntity lara,0,5,0 ElseIf KeyDown(205) TurnEntity lara,0,-5,0 EndIf UpdateWorld RenderWorld Flip Wend End *********** I don't know how exactly the game was utilizing the data but it was obviously doing something pretty wacky. |
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| thanks all i needed to do was get the models from tomb raider 4 or 5 then add animations from tomb raider 1. thanks again goober p.s. you can use the model if you want but please dont sell anything you make with it or give it to anyone else. |
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