Sneak Preview of the Firearms|Source player models.

2009-05-28 5:54 PM

It turns out there’s 2 ways to implement a player model into a game engine:

*1)*You can try to slap it on a rig, re-target the animations from an existing game character and have a model that has some of the great qualities of the professionally made animation, but mostly what you see is that the model seems to be moving like an injured fawn. Re-targeting is great, but due to my eye for animation and the general lack of precision when re-targeting I couldn’t get the guy looking right. It took about 2 weeks to come to that conclusion but I learned a ton about Source Engine character animation and some light stuff about mocap and re-targeting.

After messing around with that, a very talented animator joined us out and led me to option 2:

*2)*You can do everything from scratch. To get the character to really have some nice proper animation we had to do a few things including, making a new rig, doing all the animations from scratch, getting really down and dirty and writing a new QC animation script from scratch that meets our needs, and making approximately 90 LOD models for our existing weapons which are then skinned to a specific weapons rig which is then in turn merged into the character model rig when the game is running.

Besides having generally awesome animations, this also allows us to have weapons with detachable parts. When we first started doing this I questioned the amount of work behind it (mainly because I would be doing the QC and modeling a crapload of weapons LOD’s) but after seeing the results, it turns out it was more than worth it. Seeing the slide actually move back when firing or the clip coming out when reloading looks phenomenal. It’s truly a testament to doing something right the first time.

I would like to extend a thanks to the people worked with on this particular portion of the project because I learned so much working with you!

](resources/images/2009/05/snowstormsm2.jpg)Click the image for a higher resolution version.

Tags: firearms_source