Lately I’ve been working on improving the Necromancer enemy, which was one of the first NPCs I added when I began working on this project (second only to the monkey, which was actually the first one).
To make the necromancer more unique, I came up with the idea of making every living NPC leave behind a resurrectable corpse that can be reanimated into a skeletal variation of that enemy. The player can destroy the skeletons to collect bones and skulls that can be used for crafting and other quest related things.
Here’s a short clip of the skeletal monkey being reanimated by the necromancer.
I started by modeling all of the basic mammal bones in a single blender file with a shared texture atlas (the second image below). Then once I was satisfied enough to finalize the base bones, I moved on to start copy/pasting the bones into other blend files for all the different NPC models, then applied the AnimControl and set the proper vertex groups so it works with all the existent animations.
The top image shows a deer model that I purchased from a skilled modeler, and next to it is the undead skeleton version of his model that I assembled. The skeletal deer just needs its neck bones before its finally done -although I still have a lot of work to do assembling skeletons for all the other NPCs, and I’d also like to see if I can improve the skull models after I’ve had some more time to work on my blender skills.
There is an animation rig, but the bones are all tiny in Blender so its hard to see, but it seems as though the artist (or blender/sketchfab’s GLTF converter) arranged them at the joint that begins each bone. I’m not sure why, but for some reason all of the GLTF models I’ve imported to blender that I got from Sketchfab are like this, but the animations still run like normal.
I actually don’t use that copy of the live deer in my game (hes just there as a reference for the skeleton). For the live deer, I use a copy that was converted to .j3o directly from the original GLTF file I downloaded on sketchfab, to avoid any potential errors caused by the Blender GLTF importer. The JME importer actually imports the model with smooth shading, but it seems as though that data got lost when I imported it from GLTF in blender.
There is an animation rig, but the bones are all tiny in Blender so its hard to see
you have to change from “stick” visual type.
you can do it in right panel , when you were on object mode with selected skeleton if i remember correctly. i cant open Blender here so cant tell exactly now.
The JME importer actually imports the model with smooth shading, but it seems as though that data got lost when I imported it from GLTF in blender.
interesting, anyway its just 2-click in blender go edit mode → a → make smooth
Well, i think it could be better if you would have “source of it” anyway. like Blender file with model + skeleton + animations on it. i understand you got skeleton in blender, but animations imported correctly?
For me, if I’m going to import into blender instead of directly into JME, I also try the originals that are 99% of the time available from sketchfab. I always download both.
Me when browsing hub homepage and seeing a certain smurf icon in the WIP thread’s posters section: “Hmmm, do we have someone new who likes smurfs or is certain shader specialist back? Naah, it can’t be the latter.”
Me when I click on the topic: “O shit, I was wrong! Nice!”
Yeah there will possibly be some overlap. I have a specific style in mind, so will be build the tech to match, I don’t need very accurate physics so will fake it with localised height maps. The emphasis will be on building more than destroying really.
Hmm, there should be something I am missing here… I am not sure if I am understanding how ES is relevant here!
Based on my understanding of ES design (which a library like Zay-ES is built on that) landscape creation (in which it has no interaction with actual game entities) would be considered as just visual stuff (client-side only) that is out of ES scope.
“in which it has no interaction with actual game entities”
its not Zay-ES(You could question me, why not use Zay-ES, but we had own reasons), in my ECS Terrain itself is also entity. Sun is entity, like almost everything is entity.
i know sun will be just one entity with sun component then, but what if i will want 2 suns
but still, its not about terrain, its more about informations plotter system get from ECS to function.
i would need describe all components and systems, but you need to know ECS can be done in many ways.
Fact is, i only add DetailSpreader component with certain params(since its not just about tree leafs and anyway each tree detailspreader component can have different params) and system responsible for it work well with other ECS systems/etc. Thats all that need to be known
blender cube > array modifiers > rigid body physics > custom json exporter script > jme > data encoded in image > vertex shader + static point cloud mesh > (like most of my projects) recycle bin
I thought I was being smart switching y and z to get the data in the jme coord system… then Quaternions =/
It’s very fast though, there’s a trade off between accuracy and image memory size… with no compression at all a 1k image supports around 500 objects with 340 frames of animation each, which means absolutely nothing.
Yes, I’m so lazy I didn’t even crop the image, and I don’t care.
go edit mode → a → make smooth
