Since my original post, I've found a much better mocap library, created by the Ohio State
Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, under similarly permissive terms. The animations seem much more natural and fluid with greater detail. The female set works great, but the other two sets (male #1 and male #2) give me error messages when I try to use them, which is a shame because male #2 has some fighting animations. I haven't had time to look into the problem to see if it is easily fixable or not. Maybe this weekend.
Here's an example of the better mocap:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-LO_iArITU
The process of doing this is very quick and easy if you have basic familiarity with Blender and 3D principles in general. The hardest part is getting the form-fitting pieces of equipment to look right on the model. For the gauntlets, for example, I had to delete the leather parts and just copy the relevant geometry from the model's body, get the metal parts positioned correctly, then apply the leather texture to the new skin. The animations, on the other hand, are trivial to set up. My job is demanding about 50 to 60 hours per week from me, so I just haven't been able to sink a tremendous amount of time into it yet.
By the way, is there a specific license that y'all are aiming for, or that assets need to be compatible with? The MakeHuman and mocap data have no restrictions, but most of the weapons and armor I've found are under more restrictive (i.e. copyleft) terms.
psi29a wrote:
Can it all be exported to NIF to be used directly in OpenMW?
I couldn't figure out how Niftools is/are supposed to work or even the proper installation location. There seems to be a shortage of documentation, or it's not readily discoverable (or I'm not good at finding it). I'll keep looking when I have some time, but it would be a big help if anybody can point me in the general right direction. So, a more direct answer to your question is that I have no idea yet.
Tinker wrote:Niftools, who are writing the Blender import/export tools is a bit of a mess, they are spread between Sourceforge and Git with lots of broken links. I found a recent import/export addon for blender which does not work in 2.73, spent most of the day in dependency hell sorting out Python libraries, at one time it looked like I needed to install a 3 year old wine version just to install a library.
My experience with that was also a big waste of time, so I sympathize.
Tinker wrote:The old nif exporter plugin might be tweakable to run under current blender
I'm not a programmer by any stretch, but I know when (Mega)Glest needed to update their exporter to work with newer versions of Blender, it was a lot more than a tweak. Apparently the scripting system of Blender 2.5 and later is a whole different animal than the one from 2.49. Supposedly the development version of Niftools is aimed at modern version of Blender, but it's my understanding that it's not really functional at the moment. Blender readily exports to a number of fairly standard formats, including many that include animations. One example is the Collada format (*.dae). The game
0 A.D. uses the Collada format for its meshes and separate Collada files for its animations. This allows different human characters to use the same set of animations, much like Morrowind does. It also has different characters made up of different meshes, each defined by a Collada file, so a group of functionally-identical hoplites might have different faces and hair styles, also much like Morrowind.
(Sorry if this is a double-post. I didn't get any kind of confirmation previously, so I don't know if it worked.)