Well, not looking so good to use tails and possibly wings for anything which is expected to properly play supermodeled player animations. I'm at a bit of a loss here because I speciously assumed that robes/wings/tails/cloaks were basically the same thing. Since my last post I had added faces as a wing, using the same skeletal setup that my tails used and which would be familiar to anyone who's ever looked at a robe model in Max.
The problem was, once I started testing these guys I noticed while the bulk of animations worked there seemed to be some big issues with how the supermodeled animations played- or didn't play, which was the problem.
I tried and tried to fix what I thought was a modeling/skeletal issue on my end but a very careful re-reading of the old "facelifting nwn" threads in the Omnibus indicated that I'd fallen into the same pit that Corporate Dog had when trying to animate his player mouths. Which can be summarized as:
While you'd expect that robes/wings/tails/cloaks all work the same when it comes to playing back supermodeled animations, they don't Wings and tails don't play all supermodeled player animations back properly. AFAIK robes are the gold standard, probably cloaks too, playing back
all the player animations properly. However, when a tail is supermodeled into the a_ba supermodel chain, here are some of the problems you're going to run into:
* Torches, weapon-draw or other non-base animrooted (presumably) animations don't play back properly
* Head look does not work
* Many emotes do not work
* After performing a nod or some other animations, it's possible for both tail and player models to go out of sync with each other which...is very bad, to say the least. If you set up a simple test with, say, Maugrim (tail 189, supermodeled into a_ba) in these tests as the player's arm swinging forward during a pause animation while the tail's arm swings backward.
And wings seem to have the same issues as tails, including going out of sync with the tail model's animations.
I also tested these situations while being mounted on the horse models and I didn't see anything which made me believe the issue had been conquered in some way. Since the horse isn't meant to mimic the rider's movements like a skin mesh skeleton supermodeled into a_ba, about the best I could do was confirm there seemed to be no independent animations of the horse (outside of the pause* animations) when I tested the bullet-pointed situations above.
So there appears to be something fundamentally different with the nature of how wings and tails are done versus how cloaks and robes are, when it comes to supermodeled animations. How to get around this? Well, baking animations onto tails and wings
might address the issue but there's obviously something sketchy about them when some model events are playing through wings/tails to their supermodels and some aren't.
The cruddy part of all of this, LOL, is that both cloaks and robes, which appear to be the only viable target for a project like this are Kinda Nice The Way They Areâ„¢ and I don't particularly want to go chopping at them, even if the work wouldn't affect other existing phenotypes.
Another one of those "My god, this idea is awesome!...Why hasn't anyone done this- this is a freaking slam dunk!" ideas. Oh well, time to fall back to something a little less amibtious. Being able to see the same problematic issues using a default tail (Maugrim) supermodeled into a_ba helped immensely.
So where to next? I don't know. Despite being a little ticked off that wings and tails didn't come through for me on this, I'm maybe more in love with the concept than when I started. I didn't realize it, but there's already a prototype using robes that LeAdderNoir uploaded to the
Vault, though I don't know how much of what's in the screenshot below is in the package.
And here's some artwork from Ashtefere giving some basic idea of the variety that model parts (in red) would give, overlaying a base skin mesh.
It is hard to look at those two images and think "Naaaah! Not worth it!" I am getting a little burnt, though, so I'm not sure exactly what or how much I'm going to pursue it in the near future. I loaded a full body skin mesh from another game into Max and made it a regular creature appearance. When I changed to that appearance, of course, everything worked perfectly including head look. But, LOL, no dynamic armor and (to a lesser extent) no PLT. What a tease.
Back to the drawing board...
