I saw something neat.

[EddieDeanOfNewYork]

Swimming animations for NWN2, made by an animator *I dont know his name, but want to find out*. They look professional. He mentioned climbing and combat animations as well comming soon. Does anyone know more about this or at least the guys name / site ?


Video on YouTube

Google NWN2 swimming animations


EDIT:

Forgot to mention the shark, lol. Theres a freaking sharking doing laps around the character. It looks suspiciously like the one that mangled my foot last year while surfing in La Jola

[Hellfire]

That would be me. I post a bit here, Usually in the new creatures thread.
I'm almost completely done with swimming for all races, and all creatures that share player skeletons.

I currently have a mod setup that I'm going to use to make a video for you tube this week.
Its a NWN2 swim meet showing all the player races, swimming around.

Sharks are currently in the released monsters

[Hellfire]

Oh, my site is

rwscreations

Site hosting courtesy of Saulus.

[Phantom Lamb]

Yes, and bad ass custom models courtesy of Hellfire!

[EddieDeanOfNewYork]

you got to be kidding me , lol. That was weird.

[Frosty]

Swimming? _._

[ParadoxicalAnonymity]

Seriously, Hellfire, you blow my mind with your skill.

Outstanding, sir.

[Quoth The Raven]

Apparently horses are being implemented too

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK47ojxbgqk

Finally, some real knights!

[Doubtful]

I wish I could see YouTube stuff from work - Unless it's Rick Astley, in which case I'm glad I can't see it.

Do the horses have better conformation than the current models?

and +1 to Hellfire being made of awesome.

Edit:
I feel I may have overlooked a good opportunity for faked lechery.

Real knights?

You come with me, my little chickadee. I'll show you a real night...

Oh yes, I'll let you impliment my horse, and ride it aaaaaaall night..

[Quoth The Raven]

Actually they suck, imho. Mainly for the texture, but that's easy to fix - and I actually suspect that the animator didn't really care for development.

Link is here.

Here's a screen:

[Doubtful]

As you say textures are fixable..

That model though. I hate to be a bastard, but you have to question if they've ever seen a picture of a horse - It's so far off the mark.

It's not like it's hard to track down stuff to do with horses, the frankly amazing work of Edward Muybridge has been around since.. Oh, around the 1880's.

Mind you, might be the existing horse asset that came in one of the expansions. That was pretty wince-worthy as well.

[/bitch]

[Quoth The Raven]

And apparently, Hellfire's involved in that project too XD
The horses, I mean.

[Doubtful]

If that's true, then given the extremely high standard of Hellfire's work, I can only assume he was ill that day.

The model does look like a slightly tweaked version of the one in-game currently, if that's the case then I'm not surprised - Silk Purse out of Sows Ear does not happen.

[DM_Equinox]

Well... most of the standard NWN2 models are meh.

Why does the wolf have an arched back (they normally don't) - while the cat types do not? (they normally DO)

Just one example.

Overall, the models in NWN1 were much more lifelike and cooler looking, within that game's limitations.

[Hellfire]

Right now the animation project is a collaboration between myself, Qkrch, Kemo and Thete.

The only input I have had with the horse project is to get Qkrch a copy of a reference book called “Animals in motion”, by Eadweard Muybridge. I also purchased all of his motion study books for myself, as well as Digital Sculpting the Human Anatomy (total investment just shy of 200 bucks). The horse video was about 2hrs worth of work to prove it was possible.

The sore point for a lot of people in NWN2 has been animations. Modders were never able to do anything about replacing player animations due to the fact that OEI use a 3rd party tool called character Animation Toolkit. (CAT). We could get CAT, and we could learn CAT, but OEI could not release the skeletons for us to work with. Qkrch stepped up and re created all of the skeletons, and now we have the capability to make nearly anything.

The system we are using works fairly simply.
For each new set of animations, we duplicate the playable race lines in the Appearance.2da and change the skeleton reference for the head and body to our new animated skeletons.
Doing things this way allows us to completely replace the animations for players using a set appearance function. You get to keep your character good looks but, Run becomes swim forward, walk becomes swim slow, Idle is tread water, etc.

A vast number of things become possible with this simple system.

Things like
Mounts. (Horses, wolves, etc.)
Flying carpets
Mine carts to ride in
Row Boats
Swimming
Climb rope
Climb cliff
Crawl
Fly / Levitate
Combat animations based on class or race, or both.
And much more.

The only thing we lack is a dedicated team. Animating with CAT is pretty quick, much, much quicker than animating for NWN1 but, all those things I just listed times 6 base skeletons, times 30 base animations takes a bit of time.

Imagine this with if you will. Some Animator joins us to do combat animations.
You could have.
Kung Fu / Karate for monks (you could even have specific styles)
Fencing (Swashbucklers)
Enhanced weapon animations. (Weapon master)
Savage combat (Barbarians)

The server would check your race and class on log in and set you appearance based on your selection. As you advanced in level and you got more swashbuckler levels that monk (is that even possible?) you animations would change to that of you max class levels (if that’s what the server wanted)

This is all very possible if we had the people to do it.

As it stands right now
KEMO is doing more poses for like sitting in chairs etc.
Qkrch is working on Horse mounts.
Thete is working on idle pose recreation (this will help ease the creation of new combat animations because we will be able to reuse everything except the actual attacks.)
I plan on
Swimming
Rope climbing
Vert surface climbing
Crawling
Levitate /fly

Nothing else is planned beyond that