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Saturday, September 19, 2009

Nexuiz 'Nexus' player model.

To start things off, I've renamed this player model from Ivan to Nexus. The reasoning is that this model is supposed to replace the old one (which was the intention from the very beginning).
Now, there are some stuff that has happened, oh where to start, where to start?

I've continued with the animations and have created several new ones and even posted links to videos for people to see. However, it may turn out that I will have to redo everything again (I'm not sure I wanna go there). The thing is, Nexuiz is using a format called .zym for player models, but the devs wants to get rid of this format and introduce another .dpm. They are essentially the same and the workflow is very similar, however, dpm-format can have several influences (4) while zym only can have 1.
What this means is that zym can only have rather rigid animations, each vertex has to have it's own bone to 100%. The dpm format allows for smoother transformations for it's animations, resulting in a nicer look. Because I've animated with 1 influence I would need to re-paint the weights for the skeleton, and the animations will probably change some.

I've I'm lucky and find a good way to paint and distribute or copy those weights to other meshes I won't have to reanimate everything but just tweak the current animations so they fit better.
If I'm however unsuccessful I either will have to redo all of them or just let everything be 1 influence for this particular model, then in the future use 4 influences.

Only time will tell what will happen. I will probably step back a bit from this and while I re-evaluate the situation and the procedures I may work on something else in the meantime.

Animation test 3:


Animation test 2: