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Rigging and animating character models in late 90's

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luke11685
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Rigging and animating character models in late 90's

Post by luke11685 »

In late 90's all character 3d models got simple skeletal meshes,right? So why animating characters in Autodesk Lightwave according to Cliff Bleszinski's articles related to Unreal 1 the video game got like each 3D model to animate more like making 2D traditional cartoon than animated 3d skeletal mesh? Did Epic Games made exception of making 3d animations for their character models in different way than the others? According to(I'm just interpreting his words)Andy Gavin had stated that low poly character 3D models got that simple skeletal meshes in this interview.

I'm asking because I'm so much pissed off that Epic Games(they are complicating everything to me while trying to recreate Jazz Jackrabbit 3 intro in Unreal Engine 4) never finished old Jazz Jackrabbit 3(back then it might compete with Sonic Adventure series,Super Mario 64,Earthworm Jim 3,Spyro the Dragon,Half-Life 1,Metal Gear Solid 1,N64 Rareware's 007 Goldeneye,Rayman 2,Deus Ex...etc.) alpha demo and also they never found a publisher(they found of course only for Bioshock series,Gears of War series,but Unreal Tournament 4 is dead due to success of Fortnite Battle Royale) for this game. So how exactly animations for new indie games(now very old from late 90's of course) animations were made and why that only one way? Didn't were using normal skeletal meshes? I mean making. How Dean"Noogy"Dodrill made animations for Jazz Jackrabbit 3? Because for his indie game Never Stop Sneakin' I guess it's obvious he made just skeletal meshes to make animations,but not in case of Unreal Engine/Editor 1. Is there any way to turn morph targeting(key framing) animations(animated models,but without skeletal meshes) into visible skeletal meshes in wireframe mode in Blender?
Last edited by luke11685 on Fri Apr 17, 2020 9:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Kajgue
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Re: Rigging and animating character models in late 90's

Post by Kajgue »

Hey Luke ... Hmm don't really know what Bleszinski really means, but there's some principals to animation that applies to both cartoons and 3d characters on the most part.

If i recall it was the 13 principals of animation, but don't remember the exact name.

Unreal (i assume the jazz3 demo aswel, but i'm not certain on that) characters were imported as vertex animations, *but* would have most likely needed a skeleton while being worked on within the modelling program to not be a nightmare to work with.

It wasn't even until UT received one specific patch that updated the engine to support the skeletal animation format called .psk / .psa . (The format saves the model [the .psk] and the animations [which are stored in the .psa files] with the skeleton.

Hmm, I think somebody may have found a way to auto apply a skeleton to a vertex mesh without recreating the animations, but not 100% sure.
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luke11685
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Re: Rigging and animating character models in late 90's

Post by luke11685 »

I'm just wondering why skeletal meshes are not visible in low poly Jazz Jackrabbit 3d model from never finished third installment of Jazz Jackrabbit 2? User JCThornton on deviantart have made high poly Jazz Jackrabbit 3d model however I have problems with animating running animation.
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Re: Rigging and animating character models in late 90's

Post by Hellkeeper »

Does the game even support skeletal animations?
Old UE didn't support that, it imported all the different still poses and a mesh and cycled through them to interpolate the vertices' movement. That's what CliffB (our one and only true god) meant by "somewhat like 2d cartoons'.
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Re: Rigging and animating character models in late 90's

Post by luke11685 »

It never did, right?
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luke11685
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Re: Rigging and animating character models in late 90's

Post by luke11685 »

So Epic Games in late 90's had had some documentaries about making character animations and importing them to Unreal Engine 1?
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[UDHQ]Jackrabbit
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Re: Rigging and animating character models in late 90's

Post by [UDHQ]Jackrabbit »

Does the game even support skeletal animations?
Old UE didn't support that, it imported all the different still poses and a mesh and cycled through them to interpolate the vertices' movement. That's what CliffB (our one and only true god) meant by "somewhat like 2d cartoons'.
You can convert from skeletal animation cycles to vertex animation cycles relatively easily at the expense of unwanted artifacts in the .3d and larger filesize. Skeletal animation is in every way more efficient and better results and AFAIK, 227i supports skeletal animations.
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Re: Rigging and animating character models in late 90's

Post by luke11685 »

How unfortunate that Unreal Engine 1 didn't have so much tutorials just like Unreal Engine 4.
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Re: Rigging and animating character models in late 90's

Post by Hellkeeper »

How unfortunate that Unreal Engine 1 didn't have so much tutorials just like Unreal Engine 4.
UE 1 and 2 had a gigantic mass of tutorials actually. But time passed, sites disappeared, people moved on and didn't save their content. A lot of things are now lost, it is a sad thing, really.
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Buster
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Re: Rigging and animating character models in late 90's

Post by Buster »

The TCUERG has a huge collection of those tutorials. A large selection of tutorials (and their compilations) are found here at Oldunreal.

There's not many video tuts for Unreal 1 as there is for the Unreal editor since UT3, but the technology to make such things 15-20 years ago was scarce or not yet available, and not really possible before high speed internet.

For example, voice over IP (verbally chatting during an online game) was beta tested by only a few Unreal 1 clans back in 1999. We all ran our own PCs as servers. Then came Teamspeak. Video tuts didn't really show up until Fraps.

Plus, lots of HDD storage wasn't all that common back in the early days of Unreal. I had a 50 GB drive in 2003.
Last edited by Buster on Tue Apr 28, 2020 2:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rigging and animating character models in late 90's

Post by luke11685 »

Nostalgia rocks. We have infinite imagination. I love nostalgia. Sentiments are so epic.
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