miken1ke
patreon
Doing pre-production work (scripting animation pipeline)
🕑 Added 2022-06-21 19:34:28 +0000 UTCHey folks, sorry I haven't been posting as much, A lot of the work I've been doing lately is just technical animation stuff and scripting in blender for a new animation pipeline (consider this pre-production work for the next update to Elder Souls). Not super sexy stuff that would interest most, but considering that quite a few of you are still supporting, I think updates to my developments are the least that I can do.
I've written about a thousand lines of unique code for this new animation pipeline over the last couple of months, that's meant to bridge the animation gap and have every QOL feature animators (including myself) need.
These scripts are built to be applicable to a wide range of other skeletons and potential custom skeletons (If I decide to do that in the future)
I'm trying to replace the existing exporting pipeline for Blender to Skyrim from the ground up, and I've created custom operator classes specifically to export to FBX and then convert to HKT files (via fbximporter) that can be then processed inside the official Havok Standalone Filter Manager.
The scripts to do this are all rig agnostic, Meaning animators can create their own control rigs if they wish and still use these scripts to export to the game. (If for example the team at BS wants to rig a fully new creature and use my scripts to export their animations to the game. Or if I decide to hire or collaborate with a modeler to create a custom boss with it's own skeleton)
It also supports the concept of annotations (annotations will be keyable custom properties that the animator can add to a skeleton themselves), and will write these annotations as a text file (using hkanno or hkanno64 for LE or SE/AE respectively)
After processing in HCT, the animator will just have to drag the animations to their respective bat file to add the annotations (If I can't figure out a way to write these directly into the HKT after it is generated, which I think is possible and likely even trivial but I don't understand the conventions of how these are supposed to be written)
It also leaves the door open for creating real paired animations (since the rigging is done within blender and the processing is done in the official havok tools)
Elder Souls - Parry when?
You might be asking, couldn't you already do these things before?
The short answer is yes
The long answer is not in blender, you would have to download a version of Maya, 3DSMax, or XSI (I didn't even know about this last one)
These versions are several releases behind (almost a decade old now)
Not to mention getting a hold of those applications back then meant forking over thousands of dollars annually, and are now discontinued and have to be pirated (can't even be purchased, nor are included in any licenses anymore).
I could've done this with newer releases of Maya, but I don't work in Maya I work in Blender, and It just didn't make sense for modding tools to be made for a software not meant for hobbyists where you need to spend at least hundreds every month to use it.
That and working on a video game have been eating up all my time lately. But I want to get back into making animations, I just have to finish this first. (I'm close I just have the annotations step to finish up and then I will be golden to start pumping content back out and release an updated roadmap for Elder Souls)
