[To our readers: this week, you’re really, really going to want to watch the video and not just read the text below. Trust us. — ed.]
Hey everyone, welcome to this week’s Stonehearth Desktop Tuesday. I’m Matt Malley, and I work on animations, VFX, and 3D art for Stonehearth.
A few weeks ago, Stephanie told you that I was looking at making rigs for our models. What she didn’t mention is that while working on these animations, I was practically pulling my hair out because of one major issue in our pipeline – we didn’t have a Referenced Rig. This week let’s take a look at why this was a problem, and how solving it makes our game better!
Just as a brief explanation, a rig is a skeleton which sits directly on top of the model, and controls it like a puppet. Its purpose is to give the animator little cheats that save time and make their life easier. Referencing means to be able to use a rig without being able to modify it – this can save you from breaking your rig accidentally, and allows you to change things later down the road without losing your animation work.
This is the rig we had in 3dsmax – there is a hierarchy and the pivot points have been moved around where appropriate, but that’s about all the complexity there is.
And here are some of the issues with this:
- If you mess up while animating, it is actually possible to break your scene file, losing all animations, or get to a point where you can’t easily recover – and you just have to start over.
- If you want to do more complicated animations, like tapping a foot, or having two hands grab the same object, or rotating a shoulder without also moving the arm.. it takes an extremely long time when your Rig isn’t set up for it.
- If we realize later that we want to add a bone (like how I want to add a bone to display icons above a hearthling’s head), we would have to do that manually in every animation that has ever been made.
And this is slightly unrelated, but 3DSMax has several bugs in their animation tools that aren’t going to be fixed any time soon.
Because of all of these issues, I suggested that we transition over to Maya, and – in the process – that we create more versatile Rigs, and reference them into our scenes.
And now, after several weeks of writing over 10,000 lines of Python script we have finally arrived!
This is the Rig which I ended up putting together for our team. By transferring over our animations from Max to Maya, and adding this rig, it is relatively simple to go back and touch up anything we need. And for the future we have a lot of new functionality which allows for quicker animation and fewer headaches.
For example: before we had a rig, in order to get a hearthling foot to roll backwards (like in the foot tap), I’d have to move and rotate the foot manually, using a helper block to keep the foot in one spot.
Now, with a rig in Maya, the animation is much less onerous, I even added extra controls: foot roll/bank/twist. You may notice the foot going into the ground with this control, it is because I plan on adding a “toe” bone in the future.
The same is true for hands: instead of having to move each finger joint separately, one control can now move multiple joints at the same time.
We want to add a lot more animations to Stonehearth going forward, so this work should save us months of hard labor in the alphas to come. That means more and better content for everyone, and less backtracking work when we mess up. And that’s it for this week!
If you any questions about Rigs, Referencing, or Python Scripting – give ‘em a shout here in the comments or over at our forums at discourse.stonehearth.net. See you next week!
[NOTE: Streams at the regular times this week, but Allie and Richard will be taking Stephanie’s usual timeslot on Tuesday.]
UPDATE, 14 October
Hey Folks!
I have gotten several messages lately expressing some confusion over what it means for our team to switch from 3DSMax to Maya and how that relates to the Modding Community.
I wanted to take a moment to reassure everyone that I have not made any changes to how the game reads information. So you will continue to be able to use 3DSMax, Blender, Maya, XSI, or whatever tool you have been using in the past – with zero issues : ).
In the future I would like to _add_ things to the importer, specifically scale in animations. This is just a dream of mine at the moment, and **if** it happens, it should be possible to make sure old animation files (those without scale) still work. This is important to me (outside of community issues) simply because I don’t want to go back and re-export all of our existing animations with the new scale data.
For those of you interested in using Maya to create animations for Stonehearth: Once I am finished with writing the scripts we need here for team Stonehearth, we will look further into the legal issues around giving out things like scripts. I also plan on (someday) doing some streams with animations as a focus – but A) I’m kinda nervous about webcams, and B) Animation work takes a lot of thought and is long and tedious (i.e. is not the best watching material).
Thanks all! Please post here and/or flag me with @malley on Discourse posts to get my attention : ).
Malley