Free animations resources?

Ok, hello everyboy.

I know : things free are rare, especially in 3d. Ok, that said, i am surprise that there is even nothing like “simple swinging” bone animation to give some life to a gun in a fps. I am NOT asking for an animation with hands, as it would be specific to the weapon, but something more general, like weapons in ut2004, i.e. some random small movement that can represent the fact that the arm of the player is not made of steel.

But i can’t find anything like that. Maybe i don’t have the right keywords for that, but “free skeletal animation” or “free bone animation” doesn’t gave me anything.

Hey, i can even give some mathematical formulas to describe the movement i am looking for (like a pi/6 movement when the weapon shot to simulate the recoil and so on).

I think i can create a controller to do this job, but i would like to havea bone animation, so i’ll be able to change it later easily if i get a better one. And such “garbage animations” are likely not hard to do.

Am i asking too much ?

P.S. : i am asking for this because i arrive to the point where i am a working multiplayer game (shooter arena), and the only missing stuff is sound and animations. Right now, i use the ninja as a “proof of concept” that players can be animated when they run/walk/jump etc. but it’s only a placeholder : there is no ninja in my games, and all weapons are guns. For the sound, i can do them with my mouth/voice etc. even it will be a bit strange (but once again : it’s only temporary ^^).

I reammy think that there is some website with basic bone animation of human walking/running/jumping. The open source community has more than likely already done this “basic” stuff.

Once again : i know that complex and very realistic animations are for pro only. I am not asking for that. Even if i keep the ninja, i would like to have some movement on the gun for the fps part.

Thanks for help :slight_smile:

What your looking for is head bobing or weapon bobbing. A lot of triple a games do have animations for the arm, but its easy to something that looks decent with algorithms. You can use a sin wave to move the gun across two axes. http://youtu.be/q4d-_CCNo6g

I believe theres another tutorial in that series that discusses gun bobbing.

For one, using “some” animation for “some” bone structure doesn’t work. You need to map bones and you need to retarget the animations for the (probably different) dimensions of the current model. There is a interchange format for “humanoid animations” called BVH but even these need to be retargeted to your current model. Blender allows this and there is free BVH animations on the web, however you’ll need to read into the topic to get proper results. You can even record animations yourself using a Kinect and special software.

@8Keep123 said: What your looking for is head bobing or weapon bobbing. A lot of triple a games do have animations for the arm, but its easy to something that looks decent with algorithms. You can use a sin wave to move the gun across two axes. http://youtu.be/q4d-_CCNo6g

I believe theres another tutorial in that series that discusses gun bobbing.

I know that it’s not that hard to get something not-so-bad, but the main problem with an algorithmic approach is that i will not be able to update it later - i will have to throw in the trash all the code i made to create the code which will handle the animation. So, i prefer to have a very simple animation, but a code that will work even later, with a better animation.
Also, with the math approach i will not have the animation blending (not without a lot more work - and once again, it’ll be a useless work when i’ll want to improve the animation stuff).

@normen : i know that for each an every animation you need to have a matching name between the node and the bone, but, once again, i am looking for a single bone animation (as the weapon will move as a “block”).
Also i don’t have kinect. But, hey, many people have one. I can’t believe that in all the open source community nobody released some cheap single-bone-animation. Actually, i am really surprised of the number of website which contains free 3D model and the few number (0, it’s really not much) which do the same thing for animations.

And it’s not THAT hard to do when you have the required hardware (something like 6 camera). Then, you can create as much body animation as you want. Why isn’t there some websites where people can release their shitty-but-free animations ?

I guess because most game developers know how to combine a few sine curves to make one bone or object oscillate somehow.

it’s a bad reflex to code something that is obiously an external resource. It just mixes the logic and the presentation. Because you can do something, it doesn’t mean that you should do it.
Plus, when i walk i want some bobbing, but i don’t want to stay in a “bobbed” step when i stop, the camera should go back to the normal state. With the animation blending, it’s just straightforward : go from the “bobbing” animation to the “standing” animation. And if i start again to walk during this recovering, the animation will blend again and i’ll keep a smooth move.

If i code this comportement myself, i’ll just reinvent the wheel and i’ll get a ugly and (maybe) buggy and non-standard result.

@bubuche said: it's a bad reflex to code something that is obiously an external resource. It just mixes the logic and the presentation. Because you can do something, it doesn't mean that you should do it. Plus, when i walk i want some bobbing, but i don't want to stay in a "bobbed" step when i stop, the camera should go back to the normal state. With the animation blending, it's just straightforward : go from the "bobbing" animation to the "standing" animation. And if i start again to walk during this recovering, the animation will blend again and i'll keep a smooth move.

If i code this comportement myself, i’ll just reinvent the wheel and i’ll get a ugly and (maybe) buggy and non-standard result.

If you think so…

While working on Maker’s Tale (3rd person perspective game) I experimented with attaching the camera to the head bone of one of my models just to see what 1st person would look like:

That model used a really simple key-framed animation.

As @normen talked about, I can confirm there is loads of free BVH data floating around the web, and using blender to retarget a single head bone, or arm chain, would be pretty straight forward (once you understand Blender retargetting).

If I were trying to achieve what was outlined in the original post, personally form experience, I would go down the algorithmic approach.

Good luck.

thanks for help. I did a temporary thing with algorithms (sin, cos, etc.) and it’s enough for now.

I now work on the i18n part (which is working pretty well), the sound part (i did some magical sound with my irl desk =D) etc.

Everything is working pretty well, except for this ninja. I’ll try to find a “soldier running” with this new keyword “bhv”, thx a lot for mentionning it.

If everything goes right, i should do a first pre-alpha release the next week.

thx for your help :slight_smile:

BVH not BHV … typo … my bad sorry

For just an FPS gun bob I would use a sin wave, and speed it up based on player walk or sprint state. For other animation resources, free is hard to come by. But there are affordable solutions out there, one semi-affordable solution I ran across yesterday is Mixamo.

Basically weapon animations are stuff the modeller has to do, not stuff that belongs to the engine.
Eg as I plan to buy a few weapon modles with animations anyway, they also include a viewmodel similar to halflive. For a more simple approach this should be done gamespecific, as gun bobing is no generic feature for an alround engine. JME after all is used for many things not only shooters, or even games.

and it’s why i am looking for an external website with such animation. Include them in the core engine would be stupid, even the ninja in only in the “test” package, which is not supposed to be used in production (only for tests).

I was looking for a website like turbosquid but for animations (turbosquid is for 3D models). And even if the bobbing animation should be specific for each weapon, it could be a valid option to use the same animation everywhere to start, and replace it later.
For the weapon models, i do them myself (with sketchup) but there is no animation (even if i know exactly what i would like to have).

You know, with only some hand animation you can do a game like C.U.B.E.
And i don’t want to make money with my game, so i also don’t want to put money in it. I’ll do my best to have a good “base” and hope that people will replace models themselves. If it doesn’t happen … well, i would still have a multiplayer game, it’s not so bad to have this on the C.V. :slight_smile:

A bobbing animation should be easily acomplished with blender. Just add a circle curve,change it to your needs, then
add a follow path constraint to your weapon. Then click on Object -> Animation -> bake action.