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Walking character. Problem to make an armature moving

Messages
299
Hello

I made Under Blender a walking character. But I don't think this is a problem with blender
To do it, I made a simple animation:

- A character with his animated bones (steps of the walk)...
- this armature is a children of a plane. This one follow a bezier curve as constraint.

On blender it work. But after export to FSX, my character is totally deformed as you can see on the screen bellow :



It seem that the plane follow correctly the curve. But the movements of the bones have a big problem, obviously !!!

Anyone has an idea about this ?

Maybe more generally : i know how make an object following a path, I know how animate an armature.
But I can't animate an armature and at the same time, move him along a path !

Thank you for your help :)
 
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Messages
299
Hello Rick

I use "Ambient ..." for the mesh, the bones and the plane
like for all my characters animations.

I made the bake for the plane. For the bones I tried with and without bake with the same result.
 

=rk=

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Your image is consistent with the early days of P3D conversion, when MCX could not parse the animation tags. I had an image just like yours with the face of the P3D avatar in the middle of it, but I am unable to find and link it. I suggest you have some sort of open or undefined element, similar to a keyframe animation where the start and/or end frames are missing. Are you able to cycle the sequence and get any semblance of your animation?
 
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299
Under Blender all work.
On fsx, the plane seem to follow the curve : the character, even deformed, go along the path.
I can say that this part of the animation work.... But only this one.

I tried to use another way :
I replaced the plane by a new bone, a "Guide" bone, parent of the main bone of my character armature. For now, no other bones animations....
This bone "guide" follow the path with a bone constraint with a key at the start and a key at the end.
But this time, I'm unable to export the animation. Error messages "Generatebonekeys framerange" ...
Before export, I made a bake of the animation with "visual keying" (I tried also without that) and Bake data on "Pose". But I've the same message....

Finally what is the way to animate an armature and move it along a path ? I've no problem to animate an armature like a windsock..., or an object along a path ...
Obviously the problem is in the movement of an armature along a path
 

=rk=

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Although I have sucessfully animated a walking ramp agent, with bending knees and swinging arms, I did not use bones and the animations were key framed. Based on that, I could suggest reversing, or adjusting the orientation of your parent dependencies, changing from an arrangement that only "seemed" logical solved a similar issue with nested animations as you describe.
 
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I don't understand, what do you mean by "reversing, or adjusting the orientation of your parent dependencies" ?

The main bone of my character is linked to the plane (by "keep offset") .... This plane is only a guide to drive the armature along the path. But maybe it's a wrong way.
I don't understand why the armature, who correctly work when is alone, becomes deformed when linked with the guide.

With my first way, the character move along the path if no bones is animated. On another side, the character is correctly animated if used without path.
But the two together seem to have a problem.

I think i'm wrong with the method.
With the second way, I'm unable to export the file !!!
 
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=rk=

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I am pretty sure you need to have a hierarchy of dependency as represented by each level of animation being tied to a parent bone above. Shoulder is parent to elbow, elbow is parent to wrist, wrist is parent to each finger.
 
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it's your animation object deforming when linked to a path? just curiousity because it's the issue I encountered when playing with animations. and here the investigation was suspended...
 
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Yes, it seem to be the problem.
As I said, my character animation work until I create a path and link the character to the path.

Maybe is it impossible to have a an armature following a path in FSX ?
It will be strange.
I think I do Something wrong

I join my file. Maybe someone can take a look :oops:
 

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I don't think so, I guess it is the way to go. all those animations I have could see in some sceneries must have followed this method, not sure really, one can't find anything about the matter, I think it must be a step is faulty.
 
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299
I tried another thing but I get a error message when I export the file.
I replaced the plane by a new bone. This new bone, the guide, has the constaint "follow path"

And here, the message :


I don't move, like my character :(
 
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maybe you have to rebuild animations from scratch. anyway just thinking a Little maybe the path constrain is a bad idea. could be that ataching the object to a dummy objet and moving the dummy instead. in fsx it is used frequently, I think I have read something time ago, about bounding boxes related to this issue ,but can't remember exactly what all this was about. if I am sincere I am totally lost.. if it worked with path constraint would be great because one could define the object trajectory more accurately . good luck
 

=rk=

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I have composed a very convincing walk cycle, imo, but I used key frame bone animation on sub component models, I did not use Blender or mesh.

2Z92Y4B.jpg

hNynXhm.jpg


I compiled the model as a vehicle and drove it around the airport to test the animations, the pace of the steps increases with speed exactly the same way tire rotation animations appear to. I even created some triggerable hand signals:

JOOhf4v.jpg

I did not compose the human geometry and you can see by the number of polygons that it can be difficult to find human artists that do not use something like Maya with it's bajillions of polygons and unconnected edges.
 
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299
Hello

I see, but how have you created it ? With what soft ?
I don't understand very well what you did :oops:

There is another question. How make your character walk from a point to another ...

Because as soon it's linked to a plane or an emtpy and it become deformed
 
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=rk=

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Original modelling software was Maya. My employer purchased the model through Freelancer. I converted the model to relevant .mdl format using MCX. There was some difficulty getting the artist to segment the model so that I could animate it without using mesh techniques. You can see evidence of that in the shoulder connection in the raised arm image. This were later cured and I believe my employer has abandoned this model entirely, at this point, in favor on one that was modeled by a simulator savvy artist, specifically to the needs of the application. We are talking a savings of hundreds of polygons, perhaps thousands, with no loss in visual quality. In fact, I have learned that "all" these models come from a template, the details are identical, with tongue and eyeballs that I have to manually erase to conserve polygons. These models are ubiquitous, simply look at the P3D avatar texture with the, thus far, unimplementable teeth and tongue, to see that it come from the exact same mold.

So to answer your question; I did most of the breakdown in MCX, it is my most important tool to which I and countless others owe Arno a debt of gratitude. For editing actual model parts, I would export Collada and perform the work in Sketchup. For animations, I used FSDesign Studio. Clonky, x86ish, it is surprisingly robust and capable of complex nested animations. Finally everything back into MCX; joined, cleaned up, material attributes set and good to go.

I could probably rustle up some sort of sample.
 
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