[Weapon] Bren L4A4 LMG (PR:F) [WIP]

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I was actually going to say something about that, a suggestion that while I was at it, maybe there'd be other animation tasks too, while I was in the flow. But I wanted to get into it first before I jump the gun.

[3===SPECTER===3]

It would be nice to have something all original. I've made the model pretty functional, and from the very beginning I had an eye for separating the various parts of it so that the parts of the model could be animated.

No I'd much rather see this model animated independently. The model and textures have had so much work and care put into them, it'd be a shame to see this just use placeholder animations.

Ye I've already looked into it and the FH2 ones do sort of work abouts, although I do need to butcher the rear sight quite a bit to make it line up with the sight in animations and there are very few moving parts in the animations, with also them not being quite what we need for how we setup our LMGs but they will do as a place holder. Currently we are in talks with FH2 about using them as one but ideally, we really do need new animations that are made for this weapon, to PR's timing and settings.

It's good that they at least work as a placeholder tho. I'd rather see placeholders than this not making it into the mod at all. And I'd rather see the animations done properly than use placeholders

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Don't worry man, to my understanding, things are geared to keep moving forward, never really backward, at least with Falklands. Rhino has the most recent copy, backed up in a repository for Falklands, and I've got a copy of the most recent now as well too, backed up on my Google Drive.

It'll happen... eventually, all this will happen. It's taken this model somewhere around a year I think? Half-year? I forget, but either way, it's at least still moving forward.

Hey Rhino, what's the next checkpoint before a Falklands release? Or, what all tasks are eyeballed to that checkpoint?

[Rhino]

Hey Rhino, what's the next checkpoint before a Falklands release? Or, what all tasks are eyeballed to that checkpoint?

As per here: https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f562-p ... ost1976276

Rhino;1976276']We moved over from a google docs design plan some time ago to Redmine so can't give you a link to it directly since you need to be a team member but here is a quick screenshot of the current " open issues" for PR:F:

You can also find out more about many of the open tasks here: https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f388-p ... tasks.html

And many others that are in progress by community members you can also find topics in community modding for

Please also note that the above issues dose NOT represent what needs to be done before the next release. PR:F already has place holders for pretty much all these missing items and these are things we would like to have done, but are not a necessity

Also if your interested here is all the closed issues: http://i.imgur.com/Hb6E7bI.jpg

Cheers!

I ideally would like the see Bren, FM FAP, Sterling and Panhard done before the next release, although I think the Panhard is extremely unlikely in that time frame. There are also quite a few lower priority things currently under development that I would also like to see finished too. But I must emphasise the "like" in that. None of them are a requirement for the next release as all (other than possibly the Panhard) already have place holder or could easily get one from somewhere else in the mod.

There isn't a "Checkpoint" per se, but the main hurdle in the way is fully integrating PR:F into PR which can only be done right before release and before that happens I'm waiting on for some more stuff to get done as well as working on some other projects. Just needed a bit of a brake from them recently so thought I would finish up the Bren and a few other small tasks

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Ok, running into some issues @ import,. Probably should have posted here, but check the devblog for the infoz. Need help!

[Rhino]

Ok, running into problems @ mesh import. The FH2 scripts / mod tools for 3ds Max do not look anything like the ones in the tutorial vids (1-3/downloadable). Under my BF2 menu, there is no fifth entry, and I can't find that menu panel that he brings up. DO you happen to have that script, can you fling it my way?

First I take it you mean the POE2 scripts, and its under BF2 > BF2 Utilities:



I believe it has everything you need there. AFAIK Chuc was using the really old BF2 Max tools in his tut and they had serious bugs with exporting objects at like twice the tri count they should be etc.

But I also gave you the export scene so you can technically do the animations without importing the mesh as importing it is just going to create the same setup the export is in, but the mesh is going to be buggy and not setup with materials etc, although that wont matter for animations but might help to see the weapon with textures while doing them, although you will most likley need to fix the texture dirs in the materials.

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Ok, so here is my next issue, and I just want to make sure I've done this right.

So I've set up the animation scene (the one with the arms) exactly as described; set up the IK's, changed the units setup to metric/0.1 meters per unit. Saved it.

In the Bren scene (which I've made a copy of separate from what you gave me), I've changed units to 0.1 meter/unit metric, deleted all the 3p stuff, added the paths for the .dds's, saved.

Went to go merge the Bren model into the animation scene, and this is what I've got:


My question
The scaling is off, the weapon is obviously smaller than the arms. Should I scale the model up? I've found that about 250% - 300% seems about right, from the state it's in when merged into the animation scene. What should I do from this point?

[Rhino]

I didn't have any issue with scaling when I imported the mesh to see if I could quickly do some animations but quickly found out it would take waay too much time that I needed to spend on other things.



You shouldn't have needed to change the units at any point, the bren scene I gave you was in metric and to the right scale so providing you adopted its units when you first opened it, you shouldn't have a problem. If however you didn't adopt the scenes units when you first opened it, that is most likley your problem, there is a little message when you first open the scene but if you saved it after opening it, without adopting its scale then you would have saved the new units and scaling to the file...

[Mineral]

had the same thing

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Rgr... I'll scrap that Bren scene, make another copy of the export scene you gave me, and try working through it again.

[Rhino]

Ye just tried again doing a straight File>Merge with the scene Chuc provided with the 1p models from my export scene and it worked perfectly fine, other than the weapon is waay down below but you just need to move it up to be in line with the hands and camera:

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Awesome man, yeah I re-imported as per your instructions, and all was fine. I'm actually playing around with it right now, about to get some work done on this. I have all day to myself (first time in a real long time) and I'm going to see how far I can get with this.

[Rhino]

Nice sounds good, did you rotate the carrying handle to be vertical again or did I give you the old scene? I had the carrying handled rotated 115degs anti-clockwise.
Would be nice to make use of the carrying handle in some way, possibly by having the guy holding it by the carrying handle when the bipod is up (non-deployed mode), and under the gun with bipod down (in deployed mode), and when prone with bipod down having his left hand on the butt?





Also seen the bipod folded back and forth, although it seems in combat its folded forwards but if folded back when the bipod is up would make more sense to hold the weapon via the carrying handle?

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I did that. I'll be rotating it back to about those specifications you mention, I was just moving it out of the way to get the fingers and palm lined up with the forward part of the weapon. Planning on using the handle, absolutely. That's why I made it a separate object!

We're speaking the same language, here. I am absolutely thinking the same thing you're thinking in regards to the animations sir!


Correction: Just playing around in these pictures, never done any hand gesture stuff, so I was just trying it all out, seeing what I could do. I realize hand's on the forward, bipod's down . *Yeah normally the bipod up, hand forward would be about right, or bipod down, hand on handle swiveled down would be right, prone with left hand on buttstock. I get it.

[Rhino]

I did that. I'll be rotating it back to about those specifications you mention, I was just moving it out of the way to get the fingers and palm lined up with the forward part of the weapon. Planning on using the handle, absolutely. That's why I made it a separate object!

cool ye, make sure you rotate it back to excatly where it was thou before you start recording your animations as otherwise afaik, your handle might be recorded at a different rotation ingame to what you have in your max scene.


Also one thing I was thinking of for the "deploy animation" would be that the magazine port would be covered by its cover, and you would slide that back and put the magazine in, **** it then you could use the weapon
Would be quite a long deploy animation but think it would be worth it

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I was wondering about that... saw that piece of geometry and I figured that's what you had in mind. I think that is spring-loaded, so yeah, I'll definitely work on that when I do the reload anim's.


Cheers!

Chase

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Fire mode select/deployed (it's a start)

http://youtu.be/VdzVsPmmnLg

[Rhino]

Looks good but hand seems to be clipping though the inside of the carrying handle?

You should also try to export it to see if you can get it to work and to confirm there are no issues with positioning etc

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What I've done is made a .max scene for this animation, and I'll be doing that for every one of the animations, so that if any of them are ever off, I can just open the .max for that animation, adjust as necessary. On export of the animation file, all is fine. But when I go to load the model up in the BF2 editor, some of the geometry is whacked out. Like one of the bipod legs is cocked at a weird angle,and the magazine port cover is elevated about three feet in the air. Don't know if this is just a BF2Editor'izm, or if it's an omen of what the model is going to do when I go to load it up in PR_Edit on a dummy soldier, in a dummy map, with a dummy kit etc. But I'll be looking into possibly re-exporting the model after some x-form normalization and all of those kind of tweaks, only if that's the case on load in the BF2 R engine.

As for hand clipping through the handle, yes, it sure does. Like I said, it's a start. I ran out of time and energy last night, by the time I had that video ripped, my brain was in pain. And today, I have to write an essay for school, but if I can get it done in a reasonable amount of time, I can get back on this. Most of my day was probably spent just trying to figure out how to get the Link Parameters rollout to appear (the trick is to assign the Link Constraint controller, under the Assign Controller rollout, and this is not only not mentioned in the tutorials, but it's literally documented nowhere). I'd say I spent a good four or five hours just trying to figure that ridiculousness out. But hey, I got it!


I will be going through all these motions. My biggest problem is more or less going to be time, but this is some fun stuff here, and I'm built for it.

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I figured out how to start the pr_edit dedicated server, and how to set the map to the one that I want to load into. Couple of questions.

First, how do i connect a client session to this dedi (pr_edit)?!?!

Second, do I have to re-pack all the .zip files, with the changes I've made, or is that the reason for them being unpacked to a folder called "common" or "objects" i.e., will this run from those unpacks or do I need to repack the .zips?