I am very bad at representing humans and even more at animating them, but i still need to do several characters with basics animation (stand and walk) for my proof of concept of a game.
I tried Make Humans and i managed to create one human and import the model into Jme without troubles, but the problem is that i have to do all animation myself, and i’m not capable of that in a reasonable amount of time.
So i have a simple question:
Is is possible to find a very “basic” set of animations which can apply to regular models genereated with Make Human ?
if it’s not possible with Make Humans, is there another human-avatar technology which do this for me without having to reinvent the wheel of animation ? Basically creating several characters which share a similar skeleton.
Wellllllll… sorta… But it’s not without it’s own difficulties.
I went down the route you’re about to as well and it was very frustrating to the point that I just ended up doing a buncha Blender courses and working it out myself (I’m up to animating now).
So here’s the skinny on how to get human models animated with a minimum amount of work… again… sorta…
And heeeeeeeeeeeere’s the hard part… Retarget the animation to the bones… This sounds simple… But holy does it go bad quickly. Sorry. I have no link for this one.
A different option if you’ve got some cash to burn is to go to a site that sells preanimated models.
One note though. Using pre-canned animations or models with baked in animations from sites like the above you run the risk of creating a game that generally feels very similar to other games. It’s one of the reasons that there are a lot of Unity games out there that don’t go anywhere is that they don’t offer anything “new”.
Maybe just find a free model that already has stand and walk animations and just use that as a stand-in. Takes no more time than a little research to find one.
Like, for Spacebugs I was using this as a stand-in:
It’s got basic animations and is quite obviously just a stand-in model. (Though I kind of got used to seeing him after a while and tried to think if I needed androids or something .)
Maud can retarget animations between JME models. It’s free and open-source, and it even comes with preset maps for retargeting animations from “Puppet” (or “Sinbad”) to MakeHuman’s “game” armature. And Puppet, btw, includes a tolerably good walk-cycle animation.
I also think Maud is more generally more user-friendly than Blender (though I may be biased because I’m the author of Maud).
The bad news is that Maud is still a bit incomplete. But if you don’t mind being an alpha tester, I’ll give you what support I can.
Thanks a lot for all those answers, i’ll check out those solutions !
I don’t have “cash to burn” now as i do it on my free time, so i’ll stick to free solutions.
Don’t worry, my game won’t look similar to others because i do all the rest by myself (modeling of buildings/objets/nature, mechanisms, effect, networking etc …) animating humans is the only thing i don’t enjoy to do.
I was just about to take a look at make human and some animations. I’ll throw something out. If you can find any make human model that uses makehuman’s generated skeleton system and animate you. You can import it into blender, save the animation as an action, then open your model and then append the action.
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