Halo 3 Marine and Bravo-Kilos

[Kyle Hunter 0]

Can't freaking wait dude! They look perfect!

 

I got arma just for the OPTRE mod, was a little disappointed when the "Marines" were the reach models(They use the army gear but with military police helmets and a color swap)

[Paladin_ 0]

Hey friend, I love your mod and have been following it for a while, I hate asking but I love those UNSC Marine models so fricking much. Is there going to be a separate release for the models of the Marines in the meantime or are you going to wait until the brutes and their components are complete to release the mod as an entire package? 
Either way, I cannot wait for the release of this mod and love everything you are doing!

[LykosMactire 298]

17 hours ago, Paladin_ said:

Hey friend, I love your mod and have been following it for a while, I hate asking but I love those UNSC Marine models so fricking much. Is there going to be a separate release for the models of the Marines in the meantime or are you going to wait until the brutes and their components are complete to release the mod as an entire package? 
Either way, I cannot wait for the release of this mod and love everything you are doing!

Assisting Morthon for quite some time i know the answer for this: he is planning on rebuilding the models to be even more accurate than what they currently are (I helped him find some details he missed out) Therefore whenever they do release they will be even better than the pictures shown. Brutes i havnt seen any progress on it lately as he is busy with school

[Paladin_ 0]

On 12/15/2016 at 0:44 PM, LykosMactire said:

Assisting Morthon for quite some time i know the answer for this: he is planning on rebuilding the models to be even more accurate than what they currently are (I helped him find some details he missed out) Therefore whenever they do release they will be even better than the pictures shown. Brutes i havnt seen any progress on it lately as he is busy with school

 

Cheers for the info, waiting in anticipation for the final result! 

[morthon 152]

On Monkalb's Lego mod.

 

"The main reason for this release is to get the sources out for others to learn from. It's a fully independent character setup in Arma 3 using all the things there are. Animations, Ragdoll, Weapons, Clothes Swapping, Head and Face textures, lip movement and of course hats."

 

So with the release of Mondkalb's lego mod, I feel this project can finally really start kicking off. I've been delving alot into the animation system and while I think I understand it, there's still alot of unknowns and it was all very overwhelming and confusing. This is great to hear and I'm very happy. Everyone say thank you, Mondkalb! Haha

[Josh_Yong 4]

How is the mod coming?

[LykosMactire 298]

6 hours ago, Josh_Yong said:

How is the mod coming?

Rule of BI forums, dont ask for update progress. In other words, Morthon has been busy, he plans on redoing the marine models

[Josh_Yong 4]

On 3/14/2017 at 6:35 PM, LykosMactire said:

Rule of BI forums, dont ask for update progress. In other words, Morthon has been busy, he plans on redoing the marine models

Sorry about that.

[morthon 152]

Heads up, the Halo 3 Marines and possibly the shotgun will be releasing shortly as part of OPCAN.

[morthon 152]

Progress update!

 

So a while ago, I've started the process of animating, configuring the custom skeleton and putting the Brutes in-game in earnest. Unfortunately I am almost always busy so things are going slow. However, I feel confident to show some progress, things are looking good but there are still alot of snags I am having trouble maneuvering around. This because of the lack of proper documentation on how this process works. I am however really starting to understand the way the engine processes entities and their animation sets/logic. It really is impressive what the engine can do. You could theoretically do almost anything! (Iron Giant, anyone? :P)

 

So I'm at the point where the brutes are theoretically at least basically configured and they spawn in the game without crashing it (which is a great thing!). And the crude test animations/poses that I've made so far seem to be loading well in O2. They somehow don't seem to transfer over in-game. I thought this would be a model.cfg problem, but the problem still persists. I feel damn close and once I can get the animations working, It'll be onto spurting out rudimentary animations to at least get a basic movement set done. The plan is to start small, so like being able to walk and turn and stand still and then later add running, crouching etc and then of course the ability to hold a weapon. The idea is to build upon the movement set incrementally until it reaches a sufficient and dynamic level where at least as a player, you feel like you can maneuver full without obstructions.

 

Some fun pictures!

 

Two-handed weapon

 

One-handed weapon

 

Alternate two-handed (For certain heavy weapons, perhaps?)

 

Its pretty interesting learning how to best animate for ARMA. I've only ever animated for short films and Men of War, but never for a first person shooter. It'll take some adjusting to make sure it all works well and looks good in both perspectives. But I am confident enough that I think this project is well do-able. The config work is just complicated....

 

First person example:

 

 

And finally, where I am now. I believe the custom skeleton is basically configured, but I can't seem to get him out of that damn T-pose. Furiously working on trying to figure that out.

 

That's it for now, cheers!

[Macser 776]

Nice to see you're making progress. You mentioned that you managed to test out some crude animations, but in the last part of the post you say the character is stuck in the t-pose. Do you mean the animations can be run in isolation from OB, but the engine itself isn't calling them?

[morthon 152]

Well, the animations and the skeleton seem to be working, because they appear to be running inside the ingame animation viewer and when I press walk forward in-game I can actually hear the footsteps. But for some reason the character itself doesn't animate. Usually thats a model.cfg problem, but I cant seem to find the error.

[Macser 776]

Right. Well I'd expect the footsteps regardless of the animation being played. 

 

Just so we're on the same page, so to speak. When you move forward the character displays the default pose in your p3d. The rest pose? If that's the case, then the engine is looking for an rtm at a specified location, but can't find it. It knows where the model is and renders it. But doesn't have any rotations to apply.

 

The engine uses actions to determine the appropriate states (rtms and their definitions) to call, depending on what the character is doing at any given time.

 

I won't say the model.cfg isn't involved. But it sounds more like the source could be in your Cfgmoves.

[morthon 152]

The problem is fixed thanks to some aid from Mondkalb. It turns out my model.cfg contained a "-" character and ARMA apparently doesn't like that :D

[Macser 776]

I've often spent hours looking for a complex solution to a problem, only to find it was a typo or something else just as simple. Bloody frustrating.  A fresh pair of eyeballs is often the best remedy.

 

Glad to see you're back on track anyway. 

[morthon 152]

It was more like I just didn't know that "-" characters are forbidden in the model.cfg while they work fine anywhere else. I'm otherwise pretty good at detecting and fixing syntax errors. I will refrain some using them altogether from now on. You learn more every day! Very happy that it works now. I expanded the initial animations with a running and sprinting animation. I'm still 100% in the testing/experimenting phase to figure everything out, though, so everything still looks horrible. While I understand the animation system and its implementation now, there are still unknowns that I will now focus on. Things like:

 

- Procedural animations

- Animation blending (layering)

- Ragdolls

- How to properly implement memory points into the skeleton (cameras, axes for procedural animations etc)

- Integrating proxies into my custom skeleton (for weapon location, holstering etc)

- IK Chains

 

After those tests are done and figured out, I will start over and completely redo the skeleton and adjust the proportions of the character, settle on a final scale (2.6m now, feels a little short ingame, still undecided) and lay the groundwork to actually finish the character model.

[morthon 152]

Update!

 

This is where I am right now. I'm still focused on getting basic free standing motion. Right now, forward motion is pretty much implemented, so walking/running/sprinting forward in addition to moving forward-left and forward-right. Literally everything is still work in progress and the animations are quick and dirty test animations just to I can figure out the system :)

 

 

I'm gonna be doing some work on the proportions too. They just don't feel satisfying enough to me, they need to be beefier, more menacing, less "human". And I'm still undecided about the size. I might try scaling them up a bit to proper 2.8m and see how that looks.

[morthon 152]

Update!

 

Behold the new proportions, I'm very happy with this and I will stick with this, I call it the Super Brute. I tried out enlargening them to 2.80m (accurate to the lore), but it was just too big for my taste. So I scaled them back down again, the final height will thus be 2.60m (the height they actually are in H3 and H3:ODST). This looks just so much more satisfying, more animalistic, less human and most importantly, much more menacing! This also means that the 3D art concept phase is done and I will start to finalize the model and add high-poly detail in-between animating and start to texture it! This does mean I will have to start over in terms of animation, but its fine. I have been trying out alot of efficient animation techniques to take shortcuts here and there and the results were good!

 

Comparison:

 

2.80m was just too large...:

[knightlight 53]

you deserve a whole jar of cookies man amazing work keep it up

[knightlight 53]

So on the brute's voice are they most likely going to be grunts and roars?

[morthon 152]

1 hour ago, knightlight said:

So on the brute's voice are they most likely going to be grunts and roars?

 

I don't know yet. Personally I wouldn't mind if they just spoke english like in Halo 3, but it would of course be more realistic if they had some sort of alien tongue. But yeah, I'm helpless when it comes to audio design, so I might need some help with that later down the line.

[Hvymtal 1251]

If you ever decide to go back and work on the Marines some more, a boom mic, rolled sleeves, and those black gloves would be lovely

Do it how you want to though, I hope everything is still going well :)

[LykosMactire 298]

On 11/10/2017 at 11:13 PM, Hvymtal said:

If you ever decide to go back and work on the Marines some more, a boom mic, rolled sleeves, and those black gloves would be lovely

Do it how you want to though, I hope everything is still going well :)

If you were not aware, the marines were released in the OPCAN reskin pack. Morthons focus right now is on the brutes and due to RL circumstances it would be a while before he gets around to anything with the marines. Although gloves will be present on the marines come next OPCAN update. which should be within a couple weeks

[IloveArma 1]

Hi buddy, how did you get the size to work? Care to share a blueprint? I'm just looking to create human small and large soldiers.

[HorribleGoat 1464]

1 hour ago, MemetronDaBboy said:

Hi buddy, how did you get the size to work? Care to share a blueprint? I'm just looking to create human small and large soldiers.

To create different sized characters you need to make completely new set of animations for the new sized skeleton you want to use. Arma animations do not scale in engine.

Also Arma does not have "blueprints" thats an UE thing.