Issue #3185 - finding a suitable NPC model

[johndh]

Any news on this ?

Yes, and no. The news is that there is no news but will be news soon. My main computing machine took a turn for the worse (I think the old bucket of circuits got a bit too toasty a few too many times), so I haven't been able to make any progress on the model or rig lately. I just got my Raspberry Pi 3 up and running, and managed to decrypt my old disk and get my work files back as of today, so I should be able to resume soonish.

Thanks for checking. It's always good to know people take an interest in what I do.

[GreyFox]

Any news on this ?

Yes, and no. The news is that there is no news but will be news soon. My main computing machine took a turn for the worse (I think the old bucket of circuits got a bit too toasty a few too many times), so I haven't been able to make any progress on the model or rig lately. I just got my Raspberry Pi 3 up and running, and managed to decrypt my old disk and get my work files back as of today, so I should be able to resume soonish.

Thanks for checking. It's always good to know people take an interest in what I do.

I find a lot of interesting and promising sub projects browsing through the forum. I checked out makehuman just because I was thinking about alternatives for later TES titles facegen. A later search let me to your posts, and it's amazing what you did in regard to MW animations. I hope you find the time and motivation to continue your project, character animations are one of the most apparent flaws of vanilla mw.

[GeorgeTheWarp]

On a slightly unrelated note, I'll be trying to make another body model (male too, but I'll eventually get to make a female model) for this project. I know I don't have much experience, so I'm expecting this to be a 40 to 100 hours job. I've almost done the front layout (I'd send out a picture, but I forgot to send it to google drive).

As some of you might know, my computer died some times ago, so I won't be able to work all the time on the project, unfortunately. I do have access to computers, but most of them don't have GPUs. But, I got myself a job and the closest place to my job I have access to a computer that does have a GPU. Obviously, this mean they'll be some activity on this project.

As to why I'm doing this, I'd rather start from the ground up to understand wtf I am doing, and also out of interest. If this is not fine, just tell me, I'll stop my work and try to animate the body, but where is the .blend file?

Either ways, I didn't stop working on the project, announcing this quickly. I'll be working on making a new body, and I'll also try to make a cat creature (base on my cat) eventually.

[DestinedToDie]

The blend files can be found here. https://bugs.openmw.org/issues/3186

I don´t mind getting another character body. If you attach it to the same skeleton, we can have multiple races that use the same animation. The character has to have very similar geometry or else clothing/armor will not match both of our characters. Please be aware that I am going to change the skeleton somewhere in the near future, so you would have to re-do the skinning later on if you want to do it now.

I have to stop you from doing character animations just yet. As I mentioned, I am going to change the skeleton soon, which means all animations would have to be redone.

[GeorgeTheWarp]

The blend files can be found here. https://bugs.openmw.org/issues/3186

I don´t mind getting another character body. If you attach it to the same skeleton, we can have multiple races that use the same animation. The character has to have very similar geometry or else clothing/armor will not match both of our characters. Please be aware that I am going to change the skeleton somewhere in the near future, so you would have to re-do the skinning later on if you want to do it now.

I have to stop you from doing character animations just yet. As I mentioned, I am going to change the skeleton soon, which means all animations would have to be redone.

Oh nevermind that then, I'll stop making the body and will just make dem pants, or another task. I feel like I'm getting the hang of it, it just sucks not being able to work hardcore on it, like I did when I learned blender. Either ways, consider them pants done... But if it's too slow to git 'em, just make them yourself, I can't work all the time.

The reason I was making this work was I thought you stopped making the body and animations, but either ways, keep up the good work mate.
Anyways, long live Intel i3! And its included GPU!

[mattwla]

I am curious what the status on this issue is, thanks!

[DestinedToDie]

Status - we have a MakeHuman model ingame. It's set up the wrong way, so first person camera doesn't work. But you can use third person camera. A custom-made model for OpenMW is in the making, but it's taken me quite a lot of time and will probably take more. I'm set on finishing it, so we'll get it eventually.

[Ferk]

I found something interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comm ... a/c805zvl/

The original creator of the "Better Bodies" mod hosted an IAMA on reddit some time ago (5 years!) and one of the questions that came up was actually if he would be willing to give permission to OpenMW for using his assets. He was pretty cool with it, and he even seemed excited with the idea!

I wonder if he would agree to relicense it under the CC-SA (or whatever license is more suitable) so we could use those models and have finally a working player with a head that properly attaches to the camera.
He's probably still reachable in reddit, he was writting comments just 3 days ago: https://www.reddit.com/user/virnovus

[psi29a]

I remember reading that and also emailing him, as far as I understood, he didn't recreate everything and still used Bethesda's core xanim files so while his work would be under a liberal license, the problem is still that Beth owns the IP for the animations.

Please correct me if I'm wrong however.

[Ferk]

I inquired him about this, just to make sure.
His answer was:

You would need to develop new animation files, that is true. However, the animation files were never a part of our mod, and our models just used the same ones that came with Morrowind. But because our models and our mod are completely independent of the Morrowind animation files, there would be no issue with using our models.

Of course, the flip side of that is that developing new animation files won't exactly be easy.