Player modeling discussion

[Augh]

Original thread we stopped hijacking; here

 

Ok this thing is for us to try and gather together anyone who has anything to contribute to the thinking out of modifying the player character or other ped MODELS (not reskinning, in short, actual modeling) and characters in GTA:SA. If people have specific questions about how humans are modeled correctly or links and such to share that would probably be good for everybody too.

 

Personally I've been messing around with high poly characters and learning anatomy basics and some basics of rigging etc for a few months as my entire 3d menu, so some of that stuff will translate over to this, some won't. Loads of you have been tooling around with SA, some people have done slight looking into how the bones etc work this time around, a LOT of people are better at modeling out there, so a lot of people need to speak up really. (ashdexx irloading dirtyjerzian justa_newbie get in here for a start)

 

I said I'd reinstall and take a look at the peds soon as possible, and wow, wtf. They're a totally mixed bag. To view them you can, yes, simply import as with any other .dff, what info might be lost in process I don't know, but the bone rig and model can be examined easily enough.

Wtf, they're so random. Not even a common T stance, very many different "types" of modeling and level of detail. Some look great, others appear to have maybe even been brought over largely from VC and dressed up. Obviously the cutscene chars are a lot higher quality, but there's some variations in there too. "fido"/"Claude" (why the f*ck Claude, eeughh) still looks wrong Skinny tall wierdo isn't right heh. The peds use a pretty basic rig quite often with a biped style body and three bones to control the face a little it seems, I need to import more of the f*ckers in less random fashion and start really breaking them apart and stuff.

 

Post practically anything (within forum rules of course, idiot) which is of an informational or musing nature. I have to go do random things, yeah.

 

*thread bombs here

 

[iRloading]

for one thing it is somewhat agreed carl IS an ape and people mistake him for that "bigfoot" sighting in san andreas a while back~

 

anyway, i think carl uses a cut/paste type deal with his model~ noticed when hes all buffed out and uses the cop outfit, his neck is "cut off" with a normal bod and a buff head~ as well as other articles of clothing like pants/shorts etc. like variations on if hes a skinny dinny, medium rare or a fatty patty (like each has their set of model parts or something )

 

then again ive never opened anything from san an into max (or looked in depth at san an char. models), so all im saying is in guessing/theory

[justa_newbie]

First of all, thanks for starting this thread, Augh....and my

apologies to Haito_Kanakura for hijacking.

 

In that thread, dertyjerzian suggested that my model might be

"too shapely to be animated in a convincing way to be the player"

and while that might be the case for some anims

(haven't tried them all yet)...for the most part, it would seem

that R* used the same bone rig on all of their NON-cutscene

models. For example, if I use Kam's .ifp I/O script to slap a player

anim on my character, she animates like CJ would without any

problem.

 

Additionally, it's my theory that in order to get my model to replace CJ I'll

have to just break up the mesh as R* did with CJ. This would

represent a purdy big time committment on my part that I'm

not willing to partake in since it's kinda busy-werk without being

able to actually use any player models ingame. (again, back to

my original quandry of not having a way to export .dff characters).

 

One note that I would caution others about: It's a good idea to

keep your new character pretty damn close to the original

character's size relating to the bones. I felt like R*'s peds arms

were all too short, so I modeled my character with longer arms.

As a consequence, in some animations my characters hand will

go into her body (since the arm is now longer than original peds).

 

That's all I have to offer fer now...

 

 

justa_newbie

 

 

 

[Augh]

ok cool, there is some stuff coming up here I was wondering about already...

 

Proportions. Any character modeler can and will tell you proportions are freaking important. A lot of the ped proportions seem to be pretty whacked out, especially in the limbs/head size department. Judging your ped's arm length by level of wrist vs. crotch, her proportions look a lot more correct to me at least with that slight lengthen. Haha man you gave her even more T&A than I end up doing so far o_O Not that she isn't an improvement. I dunno if jerzian was commenting on more technical or I dunno womanly aspects, but the deforms look pretty good to me, about the best you could ask for from a simple rig handover, which seems mostly what we'll be having to look at. Unreal Tournament guys often bemoan the low knees of the UT skeleton, looks like arms could be a similar thing here. Having said that some of the peds seem to play pretty fast and loose with scale. This part will probably be the most annoying one, one of them anyway. The movements thing is irritating, in theory. I already have been wondering how to fix CJ's ridiculous walk and facial tic style crooked head position... or if they can even be exorcised at all T_T

 

CJ sucks. Still. I'm wondering about how he's broken up and how much of it can be circumvented or whatever. It DOES seem to be a little hack and slash in application, some of the meshes show it up more than others. Hrm. Goddamn him.

 

JAN; you tried actuating any of the face bones yet? how's it look if so.

 

And can anyone find a way around this multiple cluster file deal? Dirtiness/kludginess is no problem, I just want to break open certain files that are resistant so far (player and some clothing objects) and see wtf is going on in there.

 

I'll keep poking around. Cheers for the replies guys, keep it coming.

 

[illspirit]

Not all the peds use the same bones. There's about a half dozen different sets of bone belonging to the different ped anim' groups. Animations can be swapped between them for the most part, as I *think* they're scaled/relative to the joints. But if it works anything like VC did, using the wrong anim group for a ped will have wacky side effects like the feet sticking into the ground a little, or hands not reaching steering wheels.

 

To figure out which anim group goes with who, just look at the sixth column in peds.ide. Those can be changed easily enough, and I assume any of them should work with the player. You can also edit the sound banks used by a ped (last two columns in peds.ide), but none of them I've tested work for the player slot. They won't crash the game, but editing them will at least get him to shut up though.

 

As for replacing CJ, in theory, one could do it with a single model by editing the ignore/replacement/hide rules in clothes.dat. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it looks like you can make one model override others entirely. As in, have an entire mesh listed as a hat, and when you put it on, it hides all the other pieces.

 

*edit- Augh- The new version of Kam's script imports clumps from the multi-meshes for me. You got the new version from like last week? Or is it just some of them which don't work?

[Augh]

Illspirit, thanks for your input man.

 

o__O There is a new .dff import. Ok, that explains a lot. I moved over the weekend and was all over the place before that, dunno how I missed that anyways. I'll go find that, thanks. Muhaha f*ck you hoody .dffs, here it comes *shakes fist* I'm suspecting that was the cluster problem.

 

Blurting things based on what I've found with rigging in general so far, while scaling individual bones is a huge nono (in terms of for example max's own default bone system), far as I know global scale stuff shouldn't cause problems inside of itself, so to speak, if it was applied to all and sundry (mesh, rig, in this case I guess). I didn't try any of the animation transfer stuff yet, but I should add that to the list of destructive testing, or maybe someone will get there first. Again all tales of experiences so far and to come are welcome. I don't know nearly enough about this junk.

 

Hmmm... Something strange comes to mind when you mention the idea of hiding an entire player within a hat. I mean I see how it works, makes a lot of sense. But yeah, I still picture a magic ninja hat that transforms CJ into... heeeey.

 

Hmmm time to go look at stuff some more.

 

Cheers!

[justa_newbie]

illspirit...thanks for the tip...I just tried 3 models and got this:

 

 

my model uses the bfypro.dff bones, so I've really only checked against

animations that pertain to what the bfypro might be doing. I've noticed ingame that

for some peds (female) their chests and face gets buggered when in vehicles (I had

assummed since they were using a male animation with different weight envelops) and

your tip gives better insight into that problem.

 

anyhow...looking forward to more findings from others...

 

 

justa_newbie

 

 

[illspirit]

No problem. I only just noticed the new version last night too.

 

As for stretching bones and stuff, the way R* does the skeletons leaves a bit of room for butchering the envelopes. At least it did in VC, SA should work he same though. My first real attempt at ped modelling was basically a clothes/hair edit and a remapping, but the clothes didn't really fit the skeleton (screenie ((Steve did most of the rigging)). We ended up stretching the pelvis and thigh envelopes in all sorts of convoluted manners so they cleared the ass and knees, while the baggy baggy pants bent with the legs and pelvis. Not sure how far one could go past the bounds of the bones, but with some creative vertex weights, you can bend the rules a bit.

 

And, yea, when you put it that way, the magic hat idea does sound funny. Maybe it should be magic glasses instead.

 

 

*edit- justa_newbie, if you use the regualr player anim with the prostitute skeleton, you're likely to end up with feet hovering a few centimeters off the ground, and possibly hands clipping through the thighs while walking. I had that problem while testing my girl ped in VC as the player until swapping anim's in the ide.

[Augh]

But the magic ninja hat is cooool. Maybe hypno glasses too though. Hrm.

 

lmao, fingers. I'll have to remember the fingers. Actually I was starting to ponder that thumb, index finger, 3 finger block approach some systems go in for. I forget off the top of my head how posable CJ's hands and others are... Did that take a lot of mashing or a more straightforward part with the older rigs? Wonder if the bounds of bone influence has anything to do with CJ's tight pants he seems to favour

 

Hmm I see tit bones, this is good. That area is an unholy bitch and the whole pec/shoulder deal was worrying me. I dunno why I didn't notice them before. Maybe I was looking at the simpler ped rig when I was ponderin those(?) Or that is them and I need sleep.

 

Definitely I have seen some shockingly good results from just creative weighting in a general sense, if we're able to toy with that to a decent extent a lot of problems could be overcome I'd hope. Hrm looking at those three rigs in a row gives me a lot of questions about scaling, more now haha.

 

I got into rendering Mustang somehow T_T f*ck. Back to pedses... *whip*

 

 

Ed; Hmm what's up with them belly bones on Claude, seems a lot more seperated out than the others, despite shared gender with Cesar. Mreh endless Q's hehe.

 

Further edit; Ok, I dug out GTA Girl/was known briefly as Jun but really is fairly nameless (I need filenames is usually what forces it). She looks more reasonable than I remember, but needs f*cking cheekbones instablick. Mesh is horribly unoptimised too, I'm going to dump off over half the polys or more before I'm done. Pushing for a far higher detail level than the peds etc, but then that's generally how we/I mod cars too. Few screens with not much done if anything. JAN you should post up yours here too, people might not follow the link up top and the model's really worth showing, go for it.

 

Couple sh*tty settingsless renders, lotta clipping and junky stuff. Hair is a desmoothed high mesh, so needs a low version that WORKS;

 

 

So yeah, she's what I had when I left off. I need to decide a definitive shirt and stick with it. Probably something fairly basic vest top/strappy top like. I'd like to leave things open for clothing additions etc but it's not a heartbreaker if not.

 

Yup.

Edited September 5, 2005 by Augh

[justa_newbie]

Nice model, Augh! diggin the anime hair!

 

anyhow, here's the link you asked for (I think...you're referring

to me as "JAN" ?)

 

 

and here's a little hussy walk cycle:

 

http://img351.imageshack.us/my.php?image=walkin1hv.swf

(change the resolution to 320 by clicking the radio button

down at the bottom of the page)

 

As to yer question about actuating the face...my tests indicate

that getting the weighting envelopes close to correct will allow

the deformations to werk like R* intended. It can be kinda

tricky tho. For fine tuning, I messed with the weights while I

had an .ifp applied so I could fix areas that didn't deform well.

I still don't have all the weights working as well as I'd like.

 

justa_newbie

 

*edit* illspirit...again, thanks for the tip on the floating...hopefully

I'll get a chance to see my model ingame, then worry about

fixing it

 

 

Edited September 5, 2005 by justa_newbie

[Augh]

Yeah I seem to have started abbreviating you that way I can cut it out haha. I save like so few keystrokes anyway

 

Thanks for the words, I got to say going by my guessing on the facial structure you used, yours is a LOT harder to pull off, at least for me I didn't nail proper low poly faces, this gal will be typically me polymonsterish anyway I have to work out how to make this hair in like 1/4 the polys, but its mental atm and really inefficient underneath etc anyway, it shouldn't be such a prob. Wonder about backface cull w alpha hair issues, but I dunno if that is even a problem in a correctly set up mesh or not.

 

*watches walk cycle... woooot. Imo, it looks pretty damn good for a self professed experiment in how these things work, if we can do that inside the game engine, that's as much as I'd hoped for really already. I'm really impressed and encouraged by this stuff so far man, thanks for that btw hahah.

 

Hrm whenever I think about the faces I think of the gurning/cud chewing Ammunation clerk Gun nut peds on crank. Yummy.

 

Ok, I have a crapload of stuff to do still T_T But I am pretty much focusing my free time on getting my own girly into any built up and optimised/fused mesh, and try and start in on this sh*t too, this is really cool stuff so far.

 

Cheers, keep it coming guys

[justa_newbie]

here's what I'm talking about with the face:

 

http://img302.imageshack.us/my.php?image=chewin0wn.swf

 

You can see that there is some eyebrow deformation, but not

enough (I've weighted them incorrectly). Also, the jaw envelope

has almost no influence on the "head" bone so it still looks a

little funny. For now, I'm treating it as "good enuf" so I can at

least finish her texturing. But even that's on hold, cause I'm

trying to finish a hi-res version of her that will eventually be

converted to 1800polys-ish. *hopefully* the final model will be

less distorted and harsh (like forearms/elbows, etc.) when it's

animated.

 

justa_newbie

 

 

[dertyjerzian]

All I can add right now is that what I meant with "too shapely" was that it might be tough to have her move correctly without a complete rewash of the player bones. Anim is NOT my strong point, so I don't know how much would be ably to stay the same. I do know that if things are wieghted and counter wieghted in such a way, and maybe an extra swing to her hips is added, then the original player animations might work pretty well. That girl is hot. And no, I didn't use the hot coffee mod

[Augh]

Ahh gotcha

 

I got to say she does look pretty good in that respect using the current ani. I dunno, I never noted such a swing when someone is running with an M4 regardless of gender though. Imo a lot of it will be fairly workable. CJ walks and runs pretty funny anyway.

 

You guys really don't want me to get started on rigging booborz though, I can go on for hours.

 

Here's something Kam dropped on me that might be either useful reading, or v old news to others, I'm still lagging haha.

 

Bone & Cloth infos

 

Cheers

[illspirit]

Hmmm, just noticed a couple of should-be-obvious things I've not seen mentioned before...

 

It looks as if the clothing .dff's don't have any materials defined in them. So it looks like the engine automagically applies the torso/toro_ripped/torso_fat textures from whatever is in the players txd based on the current fitness clump. It seems the clothing is grabbed from the first texture it finds in the clothes' .txd, and then placed over the base texture using alpha tranparency and the same UV coords.

 

This will surely be a total pain in the ass when it comes to mapping complex clothes. Especially something like, say, a skirt or dress, where you'll want to have leg textures and fabric floating above, but must map them into the same space while being stuck with the original bottom layer. Unless of course someone finds a way to write in a second UV channel, but even then I'm not sure how (or if) the game would pick which map goes where.

 

Or, I suppose one could make an all new opaque texture with new mappings for the body parts and clothes.

 

Tattoos, appear to be mapped the same way, and are applied between the flesh and clothes layer.

 

Exceptions to this rule would be things like hats, necklaces, and watches which are independent of the player mesh.

 

But, yea, like I said, this is sorta obvious stuff. I never realized it before, and now my head is broken thinking about it. At any rate, we'll need to keep this stuff in mind and plan ahead while making player models.

[Augh]

I think you broke my head too >_< Haha the material and txd lookup are going embarassingly over my head but it's late here. I wondered about these issues, or more wondered about what the order and nature of material and texture autoassignments would be in the case of "no frills" plain vanilla player. Basically am atm making my test model to be a single piece mesh with fused together lower clothing layers and body, basically a parallel to the jeans and white vest version CJ model. The whole issue of how to regulate, or force (if either necessary) the engine to accept a base material type for this shebang to be applied to and used to generate the model, I never got as far as looking into either.

 

I'll attack Dexx next time I see him with this crap T_T

Meanwhile mesh optimisin continues at this end >_>

 

Cheers

[DexX]

 

It looks as if the clothing .dff's don't have any materials defined in them.

in this case being specific is important. they have materials, but no textures. None of the meshes i checked had more than one uv channel either.

 

i'm looking at the "base" model of cj that tex info would be derived from, he has 4 txd's that make up his pseudo-naked body:

player_face.txd. 1 texture (face), 128*128

player_feet.txd. 1 texture (foot), 64*64

player_legs.txd. 3 textures (legs_ripped, legs_fat, legs), 128*256

player_torso.txd. 3 textures (torso_ripped, torso_fat, torso), 256*256

 

Afro.dff, seems to have a listing of MORE dff's

 

i would suggest to anyone making a CJ-replacement, that they figure out what "parts" to replace in SA, to construct their character model. that one-body-mesh style seems to be only on peds, EVERY part of cj is detached.

[lfighter]

hi sorry to bother you but are there any unused animations in cj like skateboard riding?

[Augh]

Ummm there was a whole bunch of shaggi... nvm.

 

I dunno, I guess I will add that to the list of things to do... yeah...

 

Ok after talking to Dexx and reading this over again I still feel retarded but less so, I'm gonna stick with a format that can be broken up easily for the time being.

 

Lookit what can be done w/ them texture sizes like we said and I'll call off those CIA guys for real this time man.

 

More geometry...

 

[justa_newbie]

probably some have come across this, but in viewing some of CJ's various

.dff parts in DFF Viewer 0.1 BETA I've noticed the following:

 

 

seems all dummies are included (with 1 more than total bones--guessin) for

every .dff part.

 

also, when importing vest.dff (for example) via Kam's script into 3dMax, it's got 3 clumps and within

each there are bones I don't have in my model (again, my model's bones

are a slightly edited bfypro.dff/copgrl1.dff bones rig) which are:

 

HeadNub

L Finger0Nub

R Finger0Nub

L Toe0Nub

R Toe0Nub

 

yet...I can apply a player .ifp animation to my model and it *appears* to

work as it would on CJ.

 

anyone have a theory on why this seems to work (are the "nub" bones ignored?)

 

strangeness

 

 

justa_newbie

 

 

[DexX]

 

also, when importing vest.dff (for example) via Kam's script into 3dMax, it's got 3 clumps and within

each there are bones I don't have in my model (again, my model's bones

are a slightly edited bfypro.dff/copgrl1.dff bones rig) which are:

one clump for each of the following; "normal" cj, fat, and ripped. when you get to certain parts of the game and you've eaten too much, or worked out alot, it switches clumps as necessary.

 

my guess on the extra bones, is because there is no "base" model of any sorts that the pieces can be attached to, including the bones is necessary for any kind of animation. why they have ALL the bones in EACH dff i dont know, it does seem redundant. R* probably just kept one skeleton handy, rigged all the extra pieces to it, then exported.

[dertyjerzian]

That's strange indeed

 

I think Ashdexx was onto something with that pick-what-to-replace idea...

 

edit: ashdexx, we psted at about the same time. Is it possible that the bones are all seperate animations?

[justa_newbie]

ashdexx,

 

hmmm...maybe I should rephrase (and I could be wrong), but

if I import an animation to a rig and the animation is looking

to manipulate certain "named" bones to their proper coords,

when it doesn't find those correctly named bones, don't those

bones just stay *fixed* in 3D space?

 

it seems odd that the rig I've used still animates appropriately

even tho there are naming discrepencies...

(or maybe I'm just smokin crack and can't notice where certain

bones should be moving...have to check further).

 

still strangeness

 

 

justa_newbie

 

 

*EDIT* here's a link of an example -- "playa_kiss_02"

(please disregard the right thumb...that's weighting issues):

 

http://img348.imageshack.us/my.php?image=playakiss025er.swf

 

 

 

Edited September 7, 2005 by justa_newbie

[DexX]

due to the way hierarchial animation works, you can have mis-named objects that still move. The animation is passed down from the root object to each parent object and their children. So if you have an object that isn't named correctly, or shouldn't be there, but its linked to a piece that DOES move, it will move with that piece. Children inherit the animation of their parents (what they're linked to) and should move regardless of the name if set up to do so. Soo..

 

 

if I import an animation to a rig and the animation is looking

to manipulate certain "named" bones to their proper coords,

when it doesn't find those correctly named bones, don't those

bones just stay *fixed* in 3D space?

if the correctly named bones arent found, they wont get their specific animation, no. but they'll still inherit the animation (if any) of their parent objects.

 

i dont know exactly what you tried, with what animations or rigs, so its difficult to be precise.

[Augh]

justa; just basing off hunch/general rigging stuff, is this at all possible;

 

The rigs are a little odd in their bone layout, some bones appear to be possible "left overs", I've noted some still have seemingly default Biped default rig bone names, forget specific cases. I seem to remember these being the small, cubic or "one unit" bones at knees elbows etc, like the nub bones here (this convention is what struck me as somewhat odd, almost like helper objs). Is it possible these are the dissimilar named bones in question? If those, as the setup seems to suggest are more helpers than "real bones", they might be able to daisychain the rig that way, without causing their own influence area problems.

 

I dunno, loose hunch. It's really late here, again >_<

 

[justa_newbie]

heh, ashdexx...speedy

 

that makes some sense then...and due to my weighting, the

influence could also be "helping" move those parts, since I

wasn't able to exactly duplicate R*'s envelopes (just painted

the weights till the polygons looked like they were deforming

correctly on 5-8 imported .ifp's)

 

yeah, Augh...saw a couple named Bip too

only 2 on my rig which are: Bip01 L Clavicle and

Bip01 R Clavicle

 

Anyhow...all this yammerin makes me yearn for a proper

player/ped .dff exporter!

 

time fer poly pushin...cya's

 

justa_newbie

 

 

[Augh]

Suspicion/Question; Are R* using the biped setup as a cheap & cheerful autoclavicle?

 

The clav is a bitch to do as far as I have seen to date in most all cases. Wonder if that's the biped bones story right there...

 

Hrm

[illspirit]

 

It looks as if the clothing .dff's don't have any materials defined in them.

in this case being specific is important. they have materials, but no textures. None of the meshes i checked had more than one uv channel either.

The ones I looked at had a material branch in each clump's tree, but the material list was empty. Did I miss something there? Or do you just mean the material branch exists? Bear in mind that I'm retarded when it comes to how threedee stuff works, I just know how to make the triangles.

 

 

Regarding the extra nub bones, it could be they were just handles to grab when animating. People have swapped in a number of other character models using the .scm, and the lack of those extra bones doesn't seem to cause a problem. 'Tis probably safe to ignore them and use other bone rigs.

 

As for the biped bones, yea, I'm pretty sure R* used bipeds. VC had those same biped clavicle dummies, and if you watch this, you can see the biped object in action. Somehow I doubt they had the time or motivation to start using a different method between VC and San An given the lack of downtime between projects. Either way, the clavicle bones have weighted vert's attached to them, so they're used for something in the animations.

[steve-m]

it seems odd that the rig I've used still animates appropriately

even tho there are naming discrepencies...

Besides what ashdexx said about "inherited" animation, there's something else that might need attention.

Bones are not only identified by the name of the frame they're attached to, but also by an unique ID, which appears in both the .ifp and .dff (see section "HAnim PLG"). Now in SA, it seems they primarily use the ID method to attach anims to bones, since not all frames have the same name, especially "root".

 

So my guess is, they always included the whole skeleton because they...

• used the Biped and couldn't split off single parts
• had to make sure the same bone IDs are used for all the models

The RWG guide calls this "Bone Tagging", and R*'s exporter probably used Max's standard bone IDs, which are automatically assigned to the Biped bones. But I have no idea in what way Kam's exporter makes use of them, it might even stick to a hardcoded list of IDs.

[Augh]

Thanks for dropping by steve

 

The bone tagging stuff seems to fit pretty well with the kinda "as usable as possible across varied situations" approach R* seemed to take all over here. Definitely if I were populating an entire state, I'd want to be able to quickly reuse virtually anything possible. That seems to basically be the driving factor, like the stuff you guys both mentioned about biped. Occurs to me I have seen a lot of q's at cgtalk about "do companies rig games with biped ever?"...

 

illspirit; That thing about nubs being "handles" for animation etc totally fits with what I'm seeing too. The head nub is a perfect example, it smacks of "grab bobo here to make him nod", and is something else I also seen all over. So yeah, also seems bang on. Freedee is hard

 

So what I'm currently boneheadedly wondering still is; Do these constant references to CJ's bones in the clothing objects, cutscene props and so forth cause an actual critical problem theoretically speaking, or WOULD they likely pick up on, and correctly actuate a new, replacement skellington.

 

I ask due to testing my player model against CJ's bones for scale, and the match is actually pretty good, but CJ's arms are around 6 full inches longer than anatomically possible/normal/not offensive to look at, which is really sh*tty for my purposes

 

Dexx is hiding from MSN so I didn't flaggelate him yet today about this. We had some kind of idea but I forget what completely. Great work me.

*lurks with rusty bikechain