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#82
09-20-2011, 03:07 PM
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i was actually watching this yesterday.
i laughed at the end for some reason. epic. 10/10 | ||
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#83
09-20-2011, 03:24 PM
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Quote:
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#87
09-20-2011, 09:56 PM
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I have received a couple PMs and saw some people here asking how exactly something like this is created. I also get a lot of questions in general from friends and family who don't quite understand how digital animation works. Surely most of you here have seen behind the scenes videos of Pixar and stuff, but I'll go over some of the steps here.
In this case, the first thing to do is get a hold of the 3D geometry. There are ways of directly opening up the 3D files stored in the game's directory, but I have had little luck with making that work properly. At one point I did manage to find some hacked software that will do it, but it was buggy and just not easy to do. Not to mention it brings in the ENTIRE zone which is just unnecessary for something like this. So instead I have resorted to using a piece of software called 3D Ripper DX, which lets you load it up while playing Everquest (or any game that uses DirectX), and take a 3D snapshot. It records everything you see in your view similar to how you'd take a regular screenshot, except this method captures all the 3D data and dumps it into a little scene of it's own. It comes in already textured as well. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] So once you have your data in 3D Studio Max, it's time to prep it for animation. The characters come in doing whatever pose they were up to in the game: crouching, kicking, dieing, etc. They are not usable in this state, so they need to be manually manipulated to get back to a generic position similar to the Vitruvian man. It makes me wish I hadn't taken this corpse bug for granted! [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] Character prepped: [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] All 3D characters start in this position. This makes it easiest to "rig" the character for animation, which is what you call the process of adding a skeleton of bones to the character. The rig is a device used to animate a character. In the past (i.e. 6 years ago or so) this was a painstakingly slow process, but today there are tools that make it little more than a few clicks. The colorful cubes in the screenshot below are the bones that control the animation of the Crushbone Tetris band. The actual character model is then "skinned" using these bones as their controlling objects. Basically, you assign sets of polygons to be controlled by certain bones (i.e. all polygons that make up the left shin get linked to the left shin bone). Actually technically speaking, vertexes are assigned but I think maybe a polygon is easier to understand and visualize in layman's terms. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] Once you have the character rigged, it is time for the real fun part: animation. The foundation of digital animation includes two things: the timeline and keyframes. The timeline is of course a period of time (where 1 seconds equals 30 frames, so a 60 second video would mean 1,800 frames), and a keyframe is a like a "checkpoint" where you input what position and what rotation a given object should be at at that point in time. As time progresses, the animated object will move between those keyframed positions. You can "ramp" or "ease" in and out of those keyframes to create a more smooth, natural motion. These eases are created using bezier curves similar to what you have in Adobe Illustrator, Flash, or other vector program. Here is a timeline showing some animation curves: [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] On the right you can see layers for each animated body part, each of which has their own set of curves which define their motion over time. The colors of the curves represent X, Y, and Z axis'. Anyway I know it is brief but just thought i'd post some behind the scenes info. | ||
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Last edited by toddfx; 09-21-2011 at 02:43 AM..
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