People and Signals

[WeaselWorks]

Morning all!

Is any one expert at making animated people? I need a very simple block signal, with a guy waving a red flag if the block ahead is occupied, and either holding a green flag, (or smoking a cigarette) if the line is clear.

I'm happy to do the work myself, obviously, but if anyone is the wiz at this, then some guidance would be appreciated. Equally obviously, there's lots of possible applications for this sort of person, apart from the narrow gauge/industrial things I have in mind.

Regards,

Mike

[AndiS]

I have been dreaming of such a "signal" from the days of the prerelease debate. Unfortunately, Pete said something both plausible and negative. The way I understood it is this: For such figures, you want the game to calculate the location of each vertex in-game during the animation. You defined the movement of the bone and that results in complex movement patterns for all the vertices of the arm (in particular near the shoulder), or else it does not look smooth. Now the negative is that Kuju, DTG and the companies in between never released/enabled an exporter for such a type of animation.

All you get with available exporters is the type of animation where solid parts move relative to each other, without deformation. I had naively asked about deformation as animation before, and I got the answer that you can only translate and rotate and nothing else.

So the figure would look like a wooden string puppet, with the arm rotating at the shoulder.

If you are fine with that, I suggest trying out the MakeHuman Project. They have some Blender plug-in to loads their output. But you can also export a mesh in several formats and use that in another 3D programme. They have a clothing library where you might find some generic worker's cloth passing for a railway man. It is all free to use, but I never got around trying it myself.

All you need to do after exporting is cut the arm at the shoulder and add a few meshes to close it so it looks half decent when rotating the way you need it. Says the master of theories about other people's work.

[WeaselWorks]

That sounds lame. Might need to shelve that idea for a while.

[acorncomputer]

There are characters in TS2015 that swing about, look at their watches, etc. How is this done then (all new to me).

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[WeaselWorks]

My interpretation of what Andi said is that it can be done, but DTG never released the exporter hooks fo other decs to use....

[AndiS]

Yes, that is my interpretation of what Pete said, too.

Actually, it could be that there is some exporter for this type of animations for 3DC-Max but not for Blender.