Ekmek's Civ5 Leaderscene Gallery

I think the gr2 can either be a model or animation. the animation gr2 probably just tells the bones to move over a sequence

Ekmek said:

I think the gr2 can either be a model or animation. the animation gr2 probably just tells the bones to move over a sequence

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How would you go around creating an animation then? If you create an animation in say 3dsmax or blender and delete the meshes and bones, the animation also disappears.

I created kf animations in blender before for civ4. So I'd import a civ5 leader then use the blender animation feature and export it as an fbx like we do for civ4 units. then convert the fbx to gr2.

I'm a ways off from trying to do that. Units maybe but a leaderhead animation takes A LOT of times because so many bones involved.

We could follow Deliverators full civ4 unit tutorial and do it for civ4 leaders. In that case it would be best to use bismarck's camera and the generic flat scene I've been using for the background. You would use bismarck's camera so its mainly a torso shot. Although you may have to add a little bit of pants or something because its nt at the same level as bismarck. unless someone figures out how to make a camera or align it right.

I think it's important that we try to get our hands into as much customization as possible - animation, camera, lights, etc. We shouldn't settle for only using existing animation/cameras/lights if we can. And we need to get as much help from people like Deliverator as we can.

But of course, I still need to learn the basic part of it (your tutorial will certainly help), so it's not like I can do much now. But I'm certainly interested in custom everything.

Wodhann said:

How would you go around creating an animation then? If you create an animation in say 3dsmax or blender and delete the meshes and bones, the animation also disappears.

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In short, you can export the model with animation to fbx, then open the fbx in Nexus Buddy 2 and hit the "Save Anim." button.

Nutty said:

In short, you can export the model with animation to fbx, then open the fbx in Nexus Buddy 2 and hit the "Save Anim." button.

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OH. That makes sense. Thanks.

Just wondering though, does the animation files use the names of the bones to move things around? So for example, if I have an animation that was made for a specific model, but apply it to a different model that has similar names for bones, it will move the bones (say bone_arm) like the animation says or will it just not work/crash? The reason I'm asking this is because I want to understand how it works.

Hi, ekmek,

more observations.....i looked at various LHs in both assetviewer AND granny viewer....interestingly, NONE of the "layer" or "hear_it" aminations fire, except for minor movements in the mouth and possibly some movements in the knees....i then switched your parkes.gr2 to a fresh bismark and all the animations fired correctly in game....

ok....here is what I have done to your parkes so far....i nb2ed your gr2, imported in blender. I did a minor adjustment on the beard texture to line it up a little better. I exported br2. I then loaded that br2 on a fresh bismark, got rid of a couple of extra materials, assigned the textures you had assigned and tested in game....NO ANIMATION FREEZES....i did have some issues with the hair materials....images below...

the "standard" leader hair material has the opac and tang dds's and gave me this...


the leader hair _opaque has the tang but not the opaque....


so i used the leader material (as you had as well for the hair) and got this....


I see that some leaders have two hair materials (leader hair and opaque hair)....I have not tried that.....if it is ok w you, I would like to try a little more work on the textures and sculpture, to see if the shadows can be further improved as well as clipping issues....

Oh...and is it somehow possible to get him to speak spanish instead of german??


PS...do you want me to upload the gr2 or blends that I am working on??

bernie14 said:

if it is ok w you, I would like to try a little more work on the textures and sculpture, to see if the shadows can be further improved as well as clipping issues....

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hell, bernie you know i love working with you. you don't even need to ask. keep on workin'

Are you using the gr2 in the DL section becaus e I did that bismarck/br2 swap too and it fixed my animations (maybe not all?). If you did then it means we'll have additional swap work when we make thise to make sure they are right.

Oh...and is it somehow possible to get him to speak spanish instead of german??

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I tink the fxsxml ile for parkes references an audio file. someonehas made a tutorial on changing the audio. But je's an aussie so what doyou have in mind?

PS...do you want me to upload the gr2 or blends that I am working on??

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I'll let you have a go then add your updates when you feel its ready.

FYI - I really want to try a horse one. maybe edit napoleon to be bolivar.

ok, here is some progress, I think, I was able to figure out the hair material, turns out I was confusing the sref with the opac textures....i did some sculpting on the face and hair....i reworked the textures a little and was able to make fairly adequate blur, norm, sref and opac files......i fixed some of the clipping issues in the arms and beard but the suit still pops through the beard on certain animations and I still have that strange shadow between the hair and forehead on the right (I suspect it is a texture or alpha channel issue that is solvable)......I am am now playing with the alpha channels of the different textures to see if i can get better shading/transparencies




PS...would also appreciate comments on parkes' features, i think the nose could be a little bigger and the eyes a little smaller...etc.....if more convenient, let me know to open up this commentary on a different thread....

good work bernie!

its fine to discuss here. just need to get TPagolin in on it since he requested it.

I found with the shadows that it may be the choice of lighting (I picked hiawatha) so it may have shadows for tree branches projecting on it.

the other one I couldnt get a handle on is that his eyes turned red in the 'war' animation

I found that the environment/irradiance.dds files should be from the same leader as the lighting.feel free to mess with lighting files if you want. It would be an edit to the scene.xml file.

FYI - the base game files for them are all over the place some in fpk, some in dlc, etc.

He looks fantastic Bernie! If you want pointers was for what to model him after - here is a high quality picture of the man himself (or at least, a wax model):

Bernie: The last iteration is great, I can't wait to see the final product. If you need my skills for anything, by the way, just ask. I can do a final touch-up of the texture when you're done, if you like.

some discoveries

1) the EnvironmentMap and IrradianceMap seem to have little impact on the texture and lighting....I changed those quite a bit leaving everything else the same and i did not notice much if ANY difference (soomeone whom is very detailed and obsessive may be able to make further discoveries here but I don't know if I can do much more in this regard).....as for the *_lights.gr2 specified in the *_scene.xml, there is a significant difference in how the leader is lighted, as we can see from the pic below....this is very easily done, just change the *_lights_*.gr2 in the [leader]_Scene.xml file. Also, these lights seem to be the ones "controlling how "red" the eyes get whe the leader turns negative.....there may be a re-texture solution to this as well, but haven't done much there....the light contrast between the forehead and the hairline is still an issue...will try to play with the hairline and see if that works.....

2) as I sculpted the model in blender, i pushed and pulled in many directions but there was no significant distortion in the animations, although i did not move the bones....that is a good sign.

some unfixed stuff and the possibilities

1) can't for the life of me get the LeaderHair or leaderHairOpaque shaders to work, i thought i had, but i had loaded the wrong gr2....still don't know if it is a shader issue or a texture issue....those opac and tang textures are a mystery to me. What I plan to do is try to get a really good seam between the hair and skin, particularly the beard, and see if a good texture job makes it look more "realistic".


2) serious clipping with the beard, especially when he goes negative and digs his chin into his neck.....to plans here, possibly rerig some of the beard, although the beards pinned to the chest may look even more awkward, or more radical...begin to look for another LH model that could take this guy on...

more work to do

1) teeth are somewhat off

2) the sculpt just doesn't look right....somethings seem off in the eyes or the proportions.....I'll keep working on that...

For now....I am uploading the 3DParkes File that can be substituted for Ekmek's in the australia mode....

comments and suggestions welcome...THANKS ekmek for the collaboration and the use of this space in your thread!!!

bernie14 said:

2) serious clipping with the beard, especially when he goes negative and digs his chin into his neck.....to plans here, possibly rerig some of the beard, although the beards pinned to the chest may look even more awkward, or more radical...begin to look for another LH model that could take this guy on...

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Great finds Bernie! For the one above don't spend too much time. I tried re-riging SO many different ways. i think I spent a whole day on it and it just didn't work. pinning it made the beard "roll" up. It was terrible. It has to do with the animation where bismarck tucks his chin to the test. I think we call it quits and accept the clipping. its not "that bad" really.

In retrospect i should have used George Washington on Haile Selaisse. Haile in particular may be our "civ4 alexander" where hs animations are so basic we'll use that often as a base for many leaders (and his mesh is easy to work with).

Your fixes look great! If your happy with this as a stopping point, i'm happy. Is there another leader you want to collaborate on?


animations...
I think it is possible to make animations - unfortunately unlike civ4 we can't import and modify. we'll have to do them from scratch and export to fbx which will be really painful to make it look smooth.


I'm not ready to do it yet, but if I get time I do want to import a civ4 head and skeleton and animations into civ5. We would have to use the bismarck camera since civ4 doesn't go below torso. But if we import enough of them and their animations it would be easy to get a lot of our old civ4 heads into civ5. The real downside though is that civ5 has some 20 different animations where civ4 only had 5.

bernie14 said:

some discoveries

1) the EnvironmentMap and IrradianceMap seem to have little impact on the texture and lighting....I changed those quite a bit leaving everything else the same and i did not notice much if ANY difference (soomeone whom is very detailed and obsessive may be able to make further discoveries here but I don't know if I can do much more in this regard).....as for the *_lights.gr2 specified in the *_scene.xml, there is a significant difference in how the leader is lighted, as we can see from the pic below....this is very easily done, just change the *_lights_*.gr2 in the [leader]_Scene.xml file. Also, these lights seem to be the ones "controlling how "red" the eyes get whe the leader turns negative.....there may be a re-texture solution to this as well, but haven't done much there....the light contrast between the forehead and the hairline is still an issue...will try to play with the hairline and see if that works.....


can't for the life of me get the LeaderHair or leaderHairOpaque shaders to work, i thought i had, but i had loaded the wrong gr2....still don't know if it is a shader issue or a texture issue....those opac and tang textures are a mystery to me. What I plan to do is try to get a really good seam between the hair and skin, particularly the beard, and see if a good texture job makes it look more "realistic".

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See this post. I'm fairly sure the Environment Map would only really make a difference if you had a high gloss, reflective/metallic look - the environment is the image that appears in the reflection so it can be used to create the effect of different kinds of metal e.g. gold or steel. Pretty sure that Irradiance Map is used to make objects that glow - but there may be other uses.

With regards to the Leader shader types in general. There is an issue in that the meshes that are created by the BR2 overwrite lack two properties than vanilla leader meshes can have:
1) They don't have Tangent and Binormal coordinates with are used to create smoother looking meshes. This doesn't seem to be too much of a big deal as things than have been creating via BR2 look ok in game, but it could be why some of the shader types aren't working.
2) As mentioned here, some of the vanilla Leader meshes have two separate UV layers which could well affect the way the shaders and textures work together.

Specifically on Leader_Hair and Leader_Opaque_Hair - perhaps avoid using these and try using Leader_Masked and Leader_Transparency for the hair as the vanilla Darius does. Looking at the Darius gr2 the hair meshes don't have a second UV layer so it should be possible to achieve the same set up. Also might be worth making sure you have the right format for the DDS texture files - I don't know if these files were pulled using TexMod or whatever.

Overall, your Parkes looks really good. I think the one with the Bismarck lights looks the best. Seeing as the background image has the light appearing over his shoulder you really was the light source to appear to be coming from behind as well.

New parkes looks great, I'm amazed how you improved on the first iteration.

Why is the lighting so intense on him, though? It seems some lights give him a really stronge glare, like in alex one for example.

If I were to pick a lighting I would choose one coming from the front and right like alex or suleiman. It's too bad if they look that strong though. I disagree with Deliverator on the bismark lighting, I think that one fits an indoors scene better, where there is only a strong sunlight coming from behind and a soft light coming from the front (plus it fits leaders who are in the left side of the screen better).

thanks all!!!

@Ekmek....yeah, the beard ri-rig sounds nightmarish.... I certainly agree in regards to selaisse....I'm thinking HITLER!!...he's always a very popular dl....what are you working on now???

@Deliverator....thanks for the info....i'll look into the mask and transparency shaders

@Wodhann....good question on the lighting....my initial thought was that it could be the blur texture or the sref (texture or alpha channel ???)....will experiment....I also like the suleiman and the wu, the light looks like it's coming from the right and "peeking through" the branches....bismarck lighting is easier though, cuz it don't have the hairline or red eye issue....

I am absolutely blown away! I really need to get on top of voice acting now! Hard to sync up phrases with his lips, but hopefully we can manage it not being perfect.

Wu is really nice, but then again so is Bismarck (light source is behind him so some light in front is a bit odd). Leaning towards Wu though.

Is it possible to just get rid of Bismarck's chin tuck animation and replace it with some different default anim?

Also blown away that even though he has the same structure as Bismarck, he looks completely different! Textures are awesome.

Thank you!

bernie14 said:

thanks all!!!

@Ekmek....yeah, the beard ri-rig sounds nightmarish.... I certainly agree in regards to selaisse....I'm thinking HITLER!!...he's always a very popular dl....what are you working on now???

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Yeah, I though of him too. Always good to throw the WW2 civ guys a bone! Same deal? I rig you shape/texture ? I'm trying to do my quick leader tutorial this week but I think it won't be too hard to grab all of our civ4 Hitler stuff an rig it to Haile this weekend and have something for you soon. We may have to email it, these texture files get big.

Hitler would be crazy. Even crazier would be Double Wu's for Vietnam's Trung Sisters.

Also can't wait to port Parkes into Beyond Earth. Gotta love Space Parkes.