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Chris
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« on: March 03, 2010, 04:21:59 PM » |
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Hey, just a quick update on a couple of small changes to the program:
1) Exported dsq version has been set back to 24 from the 26 that was stock in T3D. The reason for this is that a number of third party applications (such as Torque Show Tool) have not been updated to accept higher version numbers, and thus could not load dsqs coming out of Ecstasy Motion.
2) There is a new option on the Scenes tab of the Extras window. You can now choose between making "local" scene sequences, for use within Ecstasy Motion, or "global" sequences for use in iClone and possibly other export environments. The local sequences are what we have been doing until now, and they work best in any situation where you have already placed your actors in the scene where you want them to be, and you want them to move around from this position in their animation.
For exporting whole scenes, particularly to iClone but probably elsewhere as well, especially if the scenes involve melee combat between characters, it is critical that the locations of the characters exactly match the original scene setup in Ecstasy. In order to avoid a lot of annoying guesswork or complicated scripting on the receiving end, I set up a work flow where you can simply place all your actors in iClone on exactly the same spot, facing the same direction, and then the sequences themselves contain the global position data necessary to put them all where they need to be at the beginning of the scene.
Keep an eye out for some movies in the next week or so demonstrating what I'm talking about... but in the meantime, this is what that option is for. Have fun!
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[EDIT]
I also wanted to bring to your attention a couple of glitches in the system, coming from the iClone side (so I can't really do anything about them at this point.) They are both related to how iClone imports bvh files.
The first will be obvious to you immediately: there is a vertical exaggeration on all of my global anims, I'm not sure if it's proportional to distance the characters are from the origin or not, but with characters out at about (20,20) in the scene, they end up floating a meter or two off the ground. I believe you can accomodate this in most situations by planning for it and putting the floor where it needs to be, but it is admittedly annoying, and if there are many characters widely dispersed, you may have to locate the entire scene far from the origin to get them to appear level. With only two or three characters close together, though, it shouldn't matter much.
The second problem is even worse: apparently iClone scales changes in position by the size of the character you're importing the animation on to. This would make sense in most cases, since a character walking around the room is going to travel a lot farther if he is a giant than if he is a baby - but it wrecks my system here, because if the characters are different sizes then they go to different positions in the scene, and suddenly the small person punching the large person in the jaw is doing it from a couple of meters away.
For right now, you just have to solve these problems by manually tweaking each animation. I'll try to make that easier in the near future, by including scaling options in Ecstasy.
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