Pixel Perfect

My facial animation process is progressing. I have successfully animated quite a few of the poses and tested the export and re-import of the animations onto the other characters. This all works which is great, although again the overall quality of the models is poor. It will undoubtedly allow me to put some sort of experimental cut scene together though to fully evaluate how much work is involved in automating this. Looks like I might need to code a cut scene editor function into my exiting editor and code the framework support for handling cut scenes seamlessly. I will still need support for simple real time triggered speech response though as the requirement for scripted sequences might be limited.

Hi Hannibal, you might want to read through this post first: http://www.leadwerks...__fromsearch__1 With regard to lip sync I recently posted an example of this running in Leadwerks in my Neutrino Game Engine thread in the Showcase forum. To do any of this without coding though is pretty much impossible imo.

Thanks paramecij, that was certainly the intention for the demo. I think this should be very achievable by any one intending to develop games using Leadwerks. I have taken a FPSC character model today which is supposedly Dark Voices compatible and analysed it. It is indeed rigged for facial animation containing the necessary bone structure and vertex weightings. They contain no animated poses though, just the standard character animation for the main skeleton so I'm guessing that FPSC supports lip synced speech by directly manipulating the facial bones in real time. I have started today adding the necessary facial poses to the model which, although time consuming, is proving quite successful and enjoyable. Once I have all the poses done I should be able to simply export the animations and then import them to update the remaining models in the pack. Although they are pretty low poly and not really of high enough quality for Leadwerks it will at least serve as a vehicle to test out some more advanced lip synced scenes and good practice for when I want to rig and animate a better set of models. I'll update this thread with the results once it's completed.

That's ok Rick. I wasn't implying you had deliberately set out to misrepresent what I'd said. It's not always easy when replying quickly on forums and I'm sure I've probably done the same in the past.

You always take my comments completely out of context Rick. I said and I quote not which completely changes the meaning of the sentence. I don't understand why you do this!

I tend to ensure class variables are private and completely internal to the class/object. If external access is required then its provided via public or protected functions in order to maintain a high degree of encapsulation and to know the scope of any bugs/issues with the functionality lies within the class itself. I also use vector templates as my container of choice unless the design dictates otherwise where I may for instance use map containers. vectors have never caused me any problem to date and are fast and efficient. I also tend to access them using direct indexing, which I know is generally frowned upon but again has never caused me any problems.

For anyone already familiar and skilled in C++ I can see no advantage in using Lua other than as a simple scripting language. To have the game engine framework and mechanics written in C/C++ and the game logic and AI scripting implemented in Lua seems ideal and makes full use of the underlying benefits of each language.

Very nice. Good luck with the game.

You are absolutely correct on all counts! The only reason for buying the pack is to gain the wav-to-phonemes tool. As you point out once you have this then it can be used to drive any form of animated speech, not just skeletal. I load, parse and sequence already converted phoneme files in real time but it also comes with a dll which would allow you to create the phoneme data on the fly too if that is required. I didn't rig or animate the head as it comes ready animated with the package, however, it proved impossible to convert their X file successfully without breaking quite a bit of it so it had to be re-done in Fragmotion which was what has taken the time (as I'm not a modeller/rigger/animator). The animations are, as you suggest, simply single frame poses which using variable interpolation during playback result in the smooth animation. There are some FPSC character packs that come ready rigged for dark voices but I've no idea what the quality is like as they don't even advertise the fact that they are Dark Voices compatible! I will have to rig my own models unless I can get someone to do this for me. I'm assuming not all models will be suitable unless some thought has gone into the topology of the head.

Yes you will. You have come arrived at a time where LE3 is not far off its initial release and towards the end of the current LE2 product. However, having said that, the initial release of LE3 will be without support for terrain and being realistic will probably be unstable for a period of time thereafter as bugs are ironed out. LE2 is a fine game engine SDK and I suspect will be in use for some time to come yet and Josh has stated many times that the combined price of LE2 plus the upgrade to LE3 will be less than the cost of buying LE3 on its own.

Yeah, this demo was literally thrown together in five minutes having got the lip syncing working and never meant to be a polished work of art (which it clearly isn't ). You're quite right, in game the facial animation would just be part of the overall skeletal animation and the head would move to make it look more animated and natural. There are a few more facial animations that I've not shown on this particular model, however, for anyone rigging and animating their own model there are no limits to what you could achieve. If you were prepared to animate the entire 44 phonemes too (as opposed to the sub set of 9 used here) then the speech animation would pretty much approach real life quality. But to be honest, for most games the 9 are probably acceptable.

By the way, I’m not planning on doing any formal release of the code as I’ve already moved on to working on the completion of the Leadwerks end of the EKI One project, but if anyone buys Dark Voices and wants help with this just PM me and I’ll provide advice and some sample code if need be.

Thanks guys, it was good to get this done as it's not an expensive package and does work pretty well. The core code is really easy to implement in Leadwerks. The difficult thing is getting the character model heads rigged and animated but given that the rest is plain sailing! Thanks for the pointer Mike, I am about to embark on a series of modelling tutorials for Blender but where this specific requirement is concerned I'll consider anything that looks like it might get the job done without too much pain!

Having looked briefly at The Game Creators 'Dark Voices' package a few months back I'd decided I'd have a go at getting it working in Leadwerks when I had some free time. This is the result. The coding was quite easy but converting their demo model proved to be a nightmare. They provide a tool (licenced from Annosoft LLC in the States) which converts WAV files containing speech into a list of sequenced phonemes which you can then use to drive a model which has had the phonemes animated. Although the outputted file provides support for all 44 phonemes in the English language the example code maps these to just 9 basic phoneme shapes making the model animation far easier. This is the result using a few speech examples from the Dark Voices package (the voice sync has gone out slightly since loading the video to You Tube, the original is pretty much bang on). I'm quite happy this is usable and intend to integrate it into my engine soon and provide speech support for my character models

That Ogre example looks really effective!

I'd assume it's for every entity within a given AABB volume so Models, Meshes, Bodies in fact anything that derives its pointer from a TEntity type. But I don't know for a fact, I've never actually tried this as I seem to recollect it calls a user defined callback for the returned targets.

I avoid parenting too, especially with character controllers and models. Have run into all sorts of weird issues in the past when I was developing my path finding. I always now just manually up date the models position/rotation etc based on the character controllers for a trouble free life!

Fascinating!

How we create the very obstacles than eventually trip us up Well sussed!

Well this works for me: for (i = 1; i <= childCount; i++) { newChild = GetChild(child,i); newChildCount = CountChildren(newChild); if(newChildCount>0) processChildren(newChild); // Get the terrain entity childClass = GetEntityKey(newChild, "class",""); if(childClass == "Terrain") { terrain = newChild; }

I does, that's what I've always used.

I can only assume that if you are calling this function to animate the death sequence for your main character but its failing to animate that then you are somehow still animating this character else where using a different sequence which is overriding the death sequence. As its your main character and as you say connected to the player have you disabled whatever functions are normally called to provide animation for the movement. The way I animate all characters is to set their animation start and end frames and call the same routine to animate them, not separate functions for each animation. This way there is no confusion about when to call different animation functions, the same one is always called and you swap the animation frame ranges accordingly.

Is that PC running a Leadwerks OS

I tend to agree with this too. It's better to concentrate on a single language initially till you have a good grounding in fundamental programming techniques and get used to working with the Leadwerk's API. However the LUA object scripting in Leadwerks is nicely implemented though and doesn't require you to integrate it with your main development language; as it's already hooked into the Leadwerk's engine itself. So you are unlikely to face technical issues if you did work on both, it's just you have a steeper learning curve. If you already have a good understanding of programming then I'd say take the mixed route, otherwise learning two languages simultaneously and familiarizing yourself with the Leadwerk's API is probably not the best strategy!