No project, just learning

[Chosker]

to an extent you can. scale the bone as usual, then take the child bone and offset it towards the parent (with some other SkelControl)
the parent bone ends up being bigger but shorter. of course the offsetting of the child doesn't affect the vertices in the same way, but if you do it only slightly the problems won't be noticeable

I did this long ago, here's how it ended up
http://www.sanzpont.com/chosker/eliu...arstrength.jpg
notice the arms are thicker and so on. this is pure bone scaling/offsetting and material, and no morphtargets at all

[CobaltUDK]

Works well, but the joints are a bit messed if the translation aren't small. And the foot placement needs to be readjusted.



The morphs are ideally for this, but not for a modular character with clothes in separated pieces. I'm going to try if there are any way to change the skeleton but using the same animations, for the character and clothes.

Thanks

[Chosker]

yes, like I said the problem isn't noticeable if you only use small values. in your case the knees become a little too squashed but in general it looks good
and yes if you do it with the legs you need to re-adjust the footplacement

like you say this method is more ideal for a game with modular clothes. making morph targets for them all would suicide all timings of a project


also I don't remember if UDK animates the skeleton based on the bone names or indexes. if the latter, you won't be able to re-use your animations in a different skeleton. and I'm afraid it will be the case.
for this reason I've always made my characters/parts always use one universal skeleton

[CobaltUDK]

I tried reimporting the mesh with a skeleton with thicker bones, but with the same length.

No problem with animations, but nothing changes. It seems that UDK only takes the length of the bone, not the thickness.

Skyrim for example uses two meshes per character, one normal and one more fat. The problem is solved by doing the same with clothes, two meshes. I don't like that solution.

[Chosker]

yes, UDK (and most engines) only uses the length of the bones and that's because they only use the position of one bone in relation to the next one (which gets you the length) and only animates the rotations and translations from there (meaning it never needs to know about the length)

I wasn't aware that Skyrim used two meshes. they however had a multi-million dollar team, but we as indies we need to find more universal and straightforward solutions for these sort of problems, even if it means making a compromise

[AmyP]

Guys, it could be a little pretensions from my part, because I'm not a good coder. But if you adjust the collision cylinder in script, like we do in the Crouch custom position?
Crouch example just to refresh the memory:

simulated event StartCrouch(float HeightAdjust)
{
	SetBaseEyeHeight();
	EyeHeight += HeightAdjust;
	CrouchMeshZOffset=HeightAdjust;

	if(Mesh != none)
	{
		Mesh.SetTranslation(Mesh.Translation + vect(0,0,1) * HeightAdjust);
	}
}

But using it in the morph target script? (If it's done like that. I never touched in bones scale in UDK, so I can be babbling nonsense things here... If it's the case, just ignore me ^^).

[CobaltUDK]

Crouch in the morph target, and bone scale?

I think only its neccesary to reduce the cylinder height and adjust the translation.

[AmyP]

Crouch in the morph target, and bone scale?

Oh, no no! I didn't mean it. Sorry for my poor explanation! I meant about adjusting cylinder height and I gave an example of this adjustment in another application (in this case, I remember Cylinder collision adjustment in a crouch position). I even don't know how is the script used in bone scaling. So my intention was to ask if there would be something similar in bone scaling

[CobaltUDK]

Ah, you can add a "SkelControlSingleBone" in your animtree, link to a specific bone from the root animtree node and change the control name to, for example "Skel_test". Then in a fuction:

local SkelControlSingleBone Node;
	
Node = SkelControlSingleBone(Mesh.FindSkelControl('Skel_test')); if (Node != none) { Node.BoneScale = value; }

[AmyP]

So that is it .
I just used nodes in script to LookAt node and AimNode... like this:

SkelControlLookAt = SkelControlLookAt(mesh.FindSkelControl('HeadControl')); -->in my PostInitAnimTree event

but I never used skelControlSingleBone before (besides it has the same logic as you showed me). Thanks a lot! I didn't know about this.

cheers, CobaltUDK

[CobaltUDK]

Here is the video:

[jak_carver]

Dude- I never get tired of seeing what cool new stuff you come up with; you're such a bad ***!

Hey have you worked with Unreal 4 yet? I would love to see what you could do with that!

[AmyP]

Really cool!
When I tried Mass Effect demo, I spent a lot of time in character customization but their morphs didn't appeal me. Your style and customization looks more interesting for me (and I even don't like medieval fantasy much ^^).

[CobaltUDK]

I have tried u4 but I preferred to finish my project in UDK before. And I dont like the blueprints, I saw that all the tutorials were oriented to them and had decided to wait for more C++ stuff.

AmyP, Mass Effect only let customice faces, I think.

But the skeletal deformations have some problems, I have kill animations and interation with items such levers, and if the legs are long, the animations doesnt fit... so I dont know if it'll keep that in the final game.

[jak_carver]

Ha I'm sure you would tear it up in UE4 anyways!

Good luck with the project!