{"id":117,"date":"2012-01-14T17:18:55","date_gmt":"2012-01-14T17:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.daft-ideas.co.uk\/?p=117"},"modified":"2012-02-16T13:07:59","modified_gmt":"2012-02-16T13:07:59","slug":"source-engine-animation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.daft-ideas.co.uk\/2012\/01\/14\/source-engine-animation\/","title":{"rendered":"Making of Clear Skies 3: Animation Perspective."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Clear Skies is a feature-length machinima series from Ian Chisolm, that won a load of awards. You can find them all here:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.clearskiesthemovie.com\/\">http:\/\/www.clearskiesthemovie.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s filmed in the Source Engine, using the\u00a0unbelievably\u00a0powerful but oft-incomprehensible\u00a0SDK, and Eve Online. All the indoor bits, involving people, are done with Source, and all the space scenes are filmed in Eve.<\/p>\n<p>When the second part was done filming, I was introduced to Ian, who wasn&#8217;t sure about making a third, but he did mention the frustrations he was having with the limited animation set of the Source Engine.<\/p>\n<p>I told him that I thought it was possible to create our own animations, even to use Motion Capture to do the hard work for us.<\/p>\n<p>It even turned out to be possible to use\u00a0completely\u00a0markerless\u00a0MoCap.<\/p>\n<p>Shoot3d (now known as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ipisoft.com\/\">Ipisoft<\/a>), have a markerless system that has a unique advantage: it can export directly to SMD, Source&#8217;s uncompiled model \/ skeletal animation format, making it much easier to import new animations into the game.<\/p>\n<p>Before I tried my hand at doing my own Mocap, I took some BVH files and tried mapping them to a Source Engine Human Skeleton myself, and testing the results out in game.<\/p>\n<p>This turned out to be a daunting task. I knew very little about skeletal animation, and getting the mappings right took some time. I had a small amount of help from\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/mm3guy\">http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/mm3guy<\/a>, who gave me some pointers in getting the BVH working correctly.<\/p>\n<p>My first success can be found here:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TmdBOI700n4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Once I&#8217;d got this process working, I tried out Ipisoft&#8217;s Mocap software.<\/p>\n<p>For this I used:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>An old mini-DV camera, with bad interlacing<\/li>\n<li>A cluttered barn<\/li>\n<li>Myself<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Which was unfortunate, because they recommend using none of these things.<\/p>\n<p>They recommend:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Multiple HD cameras<\/li>\n<li>An uncluttered environment with little to nothing in the background<\/li>\n<li>Somebody who is not me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Undaunted, I tried anyway.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1fBlW2qg_cg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The chap visible in the video is Pope, who helped me out on the early tests. He was responsible for herding cats on Clear Skies 2.<\/p>\n<p>We also made him do the robot:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/osTsR5jNjJA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>IPISoft did a really good job of\u00a0interpreting\u00a0the image, and it&#8217;s results can be seen here:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/g0cwuZdHDiM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Actually adding this stuff to a model in HL2 is not easy or straightfowards: in some cases you have to decompile the model, which breaks all kinds of stuff, most importantly the facial flexes.<\/p>\n<p>Not ideal when you&#8217;re relying on the power of the Source Engine to bring the models to life.<\/p>\n<p>Still, the earliest result I could find is here:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/4VikTCVzgTU?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Not bad, for a\u00a0beginning. More to follow, on the rest of the process.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Clear Skies is a feature-length machinima series from Ian Chisolm, that won a load of awards. You can find them all here:\u00a0http:\/\/www.clearskiesthemovie.com\/ It&#8217;s filmed in the Source Engine, using the\u00a0unbelievably\u00a0powerful but oft-incomprehensible\u00a0SDK, and Eve Online. All the indoor bits, involving people, are done with Source, and all the space scenes&#8230; <a class=\"continue-reading-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.daft-ideas.co.uk\/2012\/01\/14\/source-engine-animation\/\"> Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr; <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.daft-ideas.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.daft-ideas.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.daft-ideas.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.daft-ideas.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.daft-ideas.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.daft-ideas.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":121,"href":"https:\/\/blog.daft-ideas.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions\/121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.daft-ideas.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.daft-ideas.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.daft-ideas.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}