Tutorial for creating new held props available, With screenshots for Misfit Model and MilkShape

[Reacher]

The tutorial is available for download MovieStorm_Held_Props.zip.
Extract the three files from the zip and open MovieStorm_Held_Props.htm in your browser.

After the first 5 seconds the tutorial is entirely interactive, click the green buttons to navigate the path you want.

I suggest 'Start at the beginning' and following it through the first time, after that you can just skip to the section you need to reference.

Depending on your Flash settings, the links may present a problem while running locally, so I have included them here:
Misfit/MilkShape MovieStorm Skeletons
Amos' Tutorial Link

Happy Modding
-- Reacher

[lucindamc123]

Wonderful, thanks for doing this. If I ever get the sound effects finished for The Man from Schenectady, I might actually have some time to make more animated props. LOL. But I also have three more movies to finish this year too.

[Armanus]

In the words of Kung Fu Panda, you are a man of pure awesomeness!

[daleh]

Really nice tutorial, I dont have much in the way of animation skill, but I think/hope this demo should enable to create some basic animations of my own.

Thanks for all your hard work on this so far, it's much appreciated.

[ms_amos]

Great work Reacher!
I'll have a play with this later this evening (as office permissions won't allow the scripts to run...).
I did take a quick look, and it looks like a very complete tutorial. Thank you for making it available.
Cheers,
Amos

[daleh]

Although I am not part of the beta test I was messing with the Male/Female files you provided Reacher for Milkhshape, though I was using Misfit3D.

Anyway, while trying to get my head around skeleton animating I decided to start with some somple rotations, and so started with rotations of the root bone.

For the Male skeleton rotating it 90 degree worked fine and the whole skeleton/mesh rotated in sync.

However for the female skeleton it distorted around the root/pelvis bone area...see attached picture.

I then noticed when looking in the Influences/Edit Joints window and using the Select Joint Vertices option that several joints/Vertices around the pelvis area with attached to the Root Bone on the male, but on the Female no joints/vertices were attached to the root bone at all.

So, is this some kind of error with Misfit only when its importing the files or is it a skinning error or just some reason why the male/female skeletons work differently?

I successfully exported this simple animation and brought it into Modders Workshop, and on the female the mesh distortion was still happening on any selected costume.

Any Idea whats happening..?

Attached File(s)

 Skeleton_Error.jpg ( 57.41K ) Number of downloads: 38

 

[Ben_S]

For the Male skeleton rotating it 90 degree worked fine and the whole skeleton/mesh rotated in sync.

However for the female skeleton it distorted around the root/pelvis bone area...see attached picture.

Any Idea whats happening..?

One of the problems we have with the Moviestorm skeletons is that they have a different hierachy from male to female.
Unfortunatly, fixing the hierachy so that they were both the same would also require updating all the existing animations and animation source files (if we were ever to work on them again), and basically is not practical.

So no, this isnt an error with your specific package, it is a problem from very early on in Moviestorm's development that we just have to work around.

[daleh]

Ahh thanks for the reply, at least now i know its not something i was doing wrong.

The work around I found for that particular simple rotation was to select the Root and Pelvis Bones and Rotate them 90degree together, then selecting only the Pelvis bone to translate that in the X,Y,Z until it came back in line again with the Root Bone.

maybe not perfect but it seems to remove the dirtortion.

[Reacher]

Yes, there are a number of things yet to learn by experimentation with animation; I hadn't run into that one yet.
That is why it is so outstanding that MovieStorm has agreed to letting us use the meshes in the base/core - so we can see in the 3D program what the deform results are.

-- Reacher

[daleh]

Yeah its an odd one, I am still not sure I understand why when rotating the female Root bone the mesh is not rotating in sync like the male one does, I guess it will be just harder to do any complex female animations than it will be male, though complex animation are probably out of my skill range!

[Mneros]

complex animation are probably out of my skill range!

practice young grasshopper

[kv]

I still have not had a play with this yet, but I have got all the files you provided and will be taking the time to study your great tutorial, hopefully my brain is not so mushy that I can`t learn lol

Thanks a lot mate

[daleh]

After some success getting some basic test anmation into Moviesotrm, including a character to character interaction, and a character to prop interaction, I a now experimenting with held props, anyway thought I'd put this Misfit question here as you have had success crating held props.

I can create a held prop animation ok and bring it into MS, but currently to do this in Misfit I am animating the puppet skeleton, and then manually adjusting the prop position for every frame to keep it correctly positioned within the hand.

Now, even with a simple anim involving the actor just raising their arm while holding the prop keeping the prop exactly positioned in the hand it quite tricky, even if adjusting it for every frame, and on a complex animation this more be extremely dificult and time consuming.

So my question is this, is there any way in Misfit to have it so a props bone it say attached to the puppets wrist bone, so when creating the animation and moving the puppets arm the prop will move with it in sync and stay in the hand? or is this something only available on more complex programs such as Blender and Max, or maybe its not even available on those and the only way to do it manually adjusting each frame?

[Ben_S]

I'm aware that our artists who use max get to 'attach' the held prop in the position they want it to be held in, so that it moves with the hand. Afraid I dont know if it is possible in Misfit, but it it worth searching your interface/options for something like that.

[daleh]

I'm aware that our artists who use max get to 'attach' the held prop in the position they want it to be held in, so that it moves with the hand. Afraid I dont know if it is possible in Misfit, but it it worth searching your interface/options for something like that.

Sadley I think this may be a feature that Misfit doesn't have, unless I am missing something obvious as I have looked over all the options. Might be time to give Milkshape a try and see if its posible with that.

[primaveranz]

Sadley I think this may be a feature that Misfit doesn't have, unless I am missing something obvious as I have looked over all the options. Might be time to give Milkshape a try and see if its posible with that.

In Milkshape you can certainly assign any vertices to any "joint" so you could attach the prop to the wrist joint if you wanted but I'm sure you can do that in MisFit as well.

[daleh]

In Milkshape you can certainly assign any vertices to any "joint" so you could attach the prop to the wrist joint if you wanted but I'm sure you can do that in MisFit as well.

Yep you can, but for an MS held prop the prop needs its own bone, which has to be animated as well and saved seperately from corrosponding puppet anim.

In max you can 'attach' the props bone to the skeleton, in the example of a ball you would attach it to the wrist bone, then when you animate the puppets arm/hand the prop would move with it in sync.

but in Misfit theres seems no way of doing this, so you have to animate the puppet and then frame by frame adjust the posiitn and rotatin of the prop to keep it alligned with the hand.

I did try an experiment where for a prop a created a bone extruded from the skeletons wrist, and so that worked great as in when i animated the puppets arm the prop moved to in sync with the hand, but....theres no way in Misfit to then detach that new bone from the skeleton and make it into a new seperate root bone just for the prop, and if you try deleting all the skeletons bones except the new one it does this but also does not delete the root bone of the skeleton, so ends up a mess.

ANyway, will keep experimenting.

[primaveranz]

as well as you know from your tutorial.

I must be getting old, I don't remember writing one of those

[daleh]

I must be getting old, I don't remember writing one of those

Oh god I must have been having a bad day yesterday, it is of course Reachers tutorial....

[primaveranz]

Oh god I must have been having a bad day yesterday, it is of course Reachers tutorial....

Don't worry. Being mistaken for someone with Reacher's abilities made my day!