Quick overview on HPL2 Animation

[Acies]

Hi!

Did this on stream, should cover the very basics of getting something animated into HPL2.

http://www.twitch.tv/acies404/c/4101414

[Daemian]

Good tuts as always. Great for newbs like me that permanently argue with Maya.
Right now I'm stuck with joints, they refuse to attach properly with the skin, it's like taking a larger area than needed and they move other parts of the model when I try to animate. You got a vid about that?

[Juras]

Good tuts as always. Great for newbs like me that permanently argue with Maya.
Right now I'm stuck with joints, they refuse to attach properly with the skin, it's like taking a larger area than needed and they move other parts of the model when I try to animate. You got a vid about that?

You have to weight paint the joints so they move (influence) the part of the skin that you want.

[Acies]

Yes, the tedious process of weight-painting; the tool I quickly showed where the mesh turns white/black (at around 6:00). You would want to paint 'the other parts' black. For example when working with a character the side of the ribs might be stretching as you raise the arms - so you would have to go over each bone in the arm and paint the side of the ribs black (for each of them).

I don't do that a lot, so I wouldn't be able to show the proper way of doing it (I know one way but haven't explored it enough to say that it is a good way!).

[Daemian]

Here, I took the angel statue. I put the joints then did the bind thing via Skin>BindSkin>SmoothBind.
Then when I try to move/rotate the foot joint, she takes half the pedestal too.

Spoiler below!

So I go to Skin>EditSmoothSkin>PaintSkinWeightsTool and nothing happens.
I get the brush cursor but I can't click anything. How is this tool supposed to work? What kind of spell do I use?

[Juras]

Lol there's no need for spells here. Weight painting is actually pretty easy, it just takes a bit of patience and time to get it perfect. Fistly, you need to select the statue mesh which you didn't, then you'll see a list on the right side of all the joints. Select the joints you want to weight paint and just paint where you want them to influence the skin(being the white color) and then where you don't want them to infuence (the black), it's pretty straight forward. Lastly, after you're done with the weight painting don't forget to normalize the weights.

[Daemian]

I watched some tuts and yeah the tool works, it's that angel model the problem, she doesn't want to get off that thing that easy. Some small parts of the model refuse to let go of the joint.
Maybe I need another tool for this.

[Acies]

Assuming that you are trying to have the angel statue walk off the pedestal you should split the angel into a separate mesh. The pedestal should be its own mesh, just a static thing.

You then export them as two separate objects, and 'add them together' in the editor. The skeleton should only be applied to the angel - that should solve your issues.

[Daemian]

Yeah ok, the pedestal is gone, I'm trying to twist the model now to a cross position (like grunt's) so I can properly place the joints and then bind the skin. Cause in the current position the bind fails.
So I got an arm selected (faces), how do I turn it? I press E and nothing happens.

[Acies]

You shouldn't be twisting the mesh into a T-shape, it's not going to go well :]

I had to look at the angel, wouldn't say it's a good mesh for setting up animation! The pose is bad, the legs are connected by vertices etc.

I quickly went over it creating a skeleton and doing some weight painting. There's still some kinks there and I'm not sure it came out better than what you had:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2079...Statue.zip

But when working with something like this as your base you'll have to settle for mediocre :] You can still go over it a little more if you would like to. Maybe you'll learn something taking a look at it, I dunno - animation is really not my thing :]