[crossfire] Modelling monsters, longer animations?

[Robin Redeker]

Hi!

Here are some of the experiences i made when making models for CF+:

On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 11:43:03AM +0200, Nicolas Weeger (Laposte) wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I've been toying with the idea to do some (3d) modelling for monsters and such 
> for Crossfire, like some are doing for CF+.

You maybe want to check the render script (in Perl) i wrote for yafray.
http://cvs.schmorp.de/browse/cf.schmorp.de/Crossfire/bin/cfxmlrender?rev=1.3&view=auto
It's not documented yet. It does the following:

- Take a yafray xml file, remove the lights, cameras, render settings and
background from the scene.
- Applys a shear transformation to all objects (Shear x by 0.25 * z and y
by 0.5 * z, so that if you look from above you get the same perspective as
the houses in scorn have).
- Next it adds 2 lights: one in the 'top-left' (if you look from above)
with power 0.5 and one in the 'lower-right' with power 1. (Both slightly
above the ground plane)
- The camera is inserted, with a per model configurable destination pixel size
and othrographic perspective, along with some finetuned focal-values.
The camera looks straight from above on the model.
Then a render setting is added with an output file.

> I was wondering about doing longer animations, like 10 frames, maybe with a 
> higher anim speed, for monsters - make 10 frames the norm instead of the 
> exception.
> 
> If monsters are modelled, it wouldn't be too hard :)

Currrently i'm having a bad time doing animations, as the tools
are just sub-optimal. First i use wings3d for modelling, it's a dream
of a mesh-modelling tool. It has a steep learning curve and is way
easier to use than blender. The only problem is, that it lacks
animations support and the UV texture exporter for yafray is broken.

Blender is the classics under the free modelling tools. But the learning
curve is just a mess. It's confusing to use, and offers only few
mesh-modelling functions and the parametric-modelling tools are awkward
to use (as it is blender). But blender has a complete and good animation
support (bone deformers, key frame animations, etc.).

Currently i sometimes export the models from wings3d to wavefront .obj
format (as this is the only format wings3d exports that doesn't crash
blender when importing if importing it at all). The only problem after
importing the .obj file(s) in blender is that blender somehow messes up
the texture<->material links, but that repairable.

So i end up copying the .wings model, change it, export it to yafray
and render it as second frame. But this is tedious, and most of the
models lack nice textures for the reason that the wings exporter is broken.

But aside that: It's a great idea, and it's indeed relatively easy with
a 3D model. - I mean: Compare that to pixeling the stuff in Gimp: 2
frames * 8 directions = 16 pictures to draw. And that multiplies even
worse for more frames :-)

> 
> Also we could (finally) have 8 directions for monsters.
> 

When i made the dread, beholder and the goblins with 8 directions
i noticed that the monsters move in a strage way. They only change
directions when they walk. So is happens that the goblin stands right
on your right side but is facing to north while hitting you.

Dreads have a different movement mode, as they run away until they are
~10 tiles away, they look exactly in the opposite direction, also when
attacking you. I hacked the code for the movement type of dreads, so
that the monster is facing you while running away.

But i guess the clean solution would have been to improve the movement
code in such a way that monsters that attack you always look at you.

PS: The models aren't yet in our CVS, but they will certainly be put
into the CVS once i get around checking them in and writing a
'build script' that renders all models in the tree.

-- 
elmex at ta-sa.org / robin at nethype.de / r.redeker at gmail.com
Robin Redeker