Unvanquished Forum

I'd like to preface this by saying I'm not very familiar with Unvanquished. I've seen gameplay footage and have perused the forums a bit, but I was curious whether or not some animations were needed.

I've created animations for a few different games floating around out there and have experience with state machines in Unreal and Unity. What would be a good starting point for this particular project? A lot of the forum threads about animation are old with dead links it seems.

Thanks in advance!

[mention]illwieckz[/mention] should probably know the most about the assets.

Off the top of my head i think there are a few models that need to be animated.

There are weapons:
-Painsaw
-HMG (chaingun)
-Sniperrifle

And an alternative female human model.

Hi @FireTemper! I'm [mention]illwieckz[/mention], project head.

Yes we are in need of an animator. Right now we have no animator but we have many things to animate.

We had animators before but with life going on they all went busy. As you noticed the threads on the topic are dormant. So you're very welcome as we are actually looking for animators!

We have models that are already modeled but not in game because they aren't animated yet.

Examples:

• A female soldier model. It is already modeled and textured. It is meant to reuse the exact same animations we use for the male model that is already in game. So maybe the only job to do is to add a skeleton that can be used with the existing animations. I'm not an animator so I don't know if it's feasible to assign an animation to another model if they share the same skeleton design, but I hope it is. I guess you'll know what's needed if I'm wrong.
• Some weapon models. What is needed is to animate the first person view, especially the reload animation. It may require a bit of modeling: one has to add the first person hand model to the weapon model and animate the hands. Once this is done and the animated first person weapon model with hands actually works in game, there is then a bit of modeling to do that is to turn the detailed weapon model into a less-detailed model to be used as a third person model.

@Gireen listed them right, there may be others models, with lower priority.

• we have some pistols but they aren't part of the gameplay yet, even with placeholders.
• some would like to see an animated first-person grenade hand throwing, this would require small gameplay changes.

Those are the priority things as we may already have the models being modeled and textured and the only reason they aren't in game yet is that we currently need an animator.

All our animated models are meant to have skeleton-based animations ( @freem all our aliens models are already segmented, if you find a comment in a code saying the contrary it's obsolete).

I'll detail the formats and other technical subjects later. Let's get your first opinion on those tasks first and what do you feel about them.

Do you have some work you done to show us?

It's awesome that there seems to be a lot to do! I'm trying to persuade a few of my friends to also hop on the train. One's a very talented coder and the other composes music and is proficient with other aspects of sound design. If you all would be interested in those skillsets, anyway.

But in response to your examples,

A female soldier model. It is already modeled and textured. It is meant to reuse the exact same animations we use for the male model that is already in game. So maybe the only job to do is to add a skeleton that can be used with the existing animations. I'm not an animator so I don't know if it's feasible to assign an animation to another model if they share the same skeleton design, but I hope it is. I guess you'll know what's needed if I'm wrong.

- Retargeting animations is a pretty simple thing to do, especially so if the rigs are near or completely identical. Rigging isn't exactly my strong suit, but I'll definitely do what I can to make it work.

Some weapon models. What is needed is to animate the first person view, especially the reload animation. It may require a bit of modeling: one has to add the first person hand model to the weapon model and animate the hands. Once this is done and the animated first person weapon model with hands actually works in game, there is then a bit of modeling to do that is to turn the detailed weapon model into a less-detailed model to be used as a third person model.

- That doesn't sound too bad. I've done quite a bit of hard surface sci-fi modelling in my free time.

I'd definitely be interested in what formats previous animators on the project have used for the existing rigs. My guess is they were done in Blender. I use Maya for animation and Max for modelling, so I'd have to do some minor conversion but that's not the biggest deal to me.

Here's my portfolio of all of my animations (with some minor rigging): https://www.artstation.com/calebbest

It's awesome that there seems to be a lot to do! I'm trying to persuade a few of my friends to also hop on the train. One's a very talented coder and the other composes music and is proficient with other aspects of sound design.

Great, we are also in strong need of sound designer to remake many of our sound effects. Doing sound effects for us is a very good way to have a real impact in making Unvanquished what it is! Like animators we deeply need sound designers: we don't have one.

Coders are also welcome, though I have to inform we currently struggle at reviewing as we are also lacking code review manpower, so patience would be more needed as a coder than for other topics.

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is that the contributed artistic files should be using a free license (free as in freedom). The Creative Commons By 4.0 license is perfect for this. By doing that you will keep your authorship but give Unvanquished game or any derivatives like mods the right to use your work or derivatives. You just have to publicly state you put your work under Creative Commons By 4.0 like in this thread or in other threads about specific work you would do and that would be done. Other licenses may be possible but this one is just fine.

- Retargeting animations is a pretty simple thing to do, especially so if the rigs are near or completely identical. Rigging isn't exactly my strong suit, but I'll definitely do what I can to make it work.

Great! Maybe we can start with the female model animation as a first attempt to do something, doing a first project like this one would also helps us to identify our own shortcomings in working with you. It made a long time we haven't worked with animators and especially new ones, so we my have forgotten a couple of things and the workflow may be a bit rusty.
Our previous active animator was using Blender indeed and we prefer Blender if possible (because we prefer to rely on free software). Some people actually used other tools in the past, if there are ways to convert things it's not a big problem. The question will then be, how much conversions are possible.

About in game formats for animated skeleton-based models, we support IQM and MD5mesh/MD5anim format. MD5mesh/MD5anim is the Doom3 format so you'll probably find some plugins to output this. MD5 stores mesh (.md5mesh) and animation files (.md5anim) separately.

In fact our human male player model from which animations has to be reported on the female model is still using md5 format.

IQM is a format that is close to MD5 model except it can store both mesh and animations in the same file. We have tools to convert from MD5 to IQM so if you struggle to export to IQM but find a working MD5 exporter this would be as good.

There is a list of IQM tools in the wiki on the Tools/IQM page, including some exporters/importers for Blender. If those don't work please tell us, sometime Blender breaks old plugins and some minor changes are needed to make them working anew.

I'll gather the files we have for the female player model and tell you informed.

Edit: I forgot to say I've looked are your ArtStation page, I was very impressed by the “Captain America Combo” and the “Spider-Man Parkour” animations! That looks super great.