Help, I’m trying to build a real rig for the first time and I’ve been following tutorials and everything seems to basically work besides some quirks here and there. Well, I have a few test animations set up, but for some reason the GE is crashing and not only that, the animations are hurting in game performance quite a bit.
This is strange becasue, I’ve made simpler rigs in the past that were all AUTO IK plus envelopes. This is the first rig I’ve tried without auto IK, which means I’ve put my own IK solvers in there and stuff like that, and now, like I said earler performance is going down a lot and it crashes once I hit escape to leave the game. All this even though the animations actually work.
I was hoping someone who is experienced with the GE and animations within the GE would help me out with it. I will email it to you because because I’m not ready to release a blend yet and also because the review I need is kinda involved and it would require a more experienced person to tell me why it’s causing slow down and crashes I think.
I’ve done simpler rigs before with AUTO IK like I said, and I stressed tested them to where I could 20 animated rigs on screen at once without slowdown. Here just one is causing a lot of slowdown, so I’m confused.
Just PM your email address or leave a comment if you are willing to try and help me.
thanks, sorry I just don’t want to release a public .blend right now, game is really early in development
hey, just answering your question with another… how did you make the animation work? if you could check my thread (dragonevo) and see if you could solve my mystery problem?
My fancy rig with IK solvers and translation contraints won’t work because the GE crashes whenever I apply ANY contraint of any kind to any part of the armature at all… can’t even get feet to stick to floor so far, which is really depressing. :no:
Am I doing something wrong. Can anybody else get a contrained Armature to work in the GE?
I don’t think it’s a bug anymore, I checked across many versions of blender and basically the GE doesn’t seem to work with armatures that have IK solvers or location/rotation contraints on them.
Also, if you can tell me who to send it to I will.
Thanks everyone for suggestions, but I really need someone to tell me whether or not they can get an armature to animate on their system’s blender game engine while:
I. Auto IK is OFF
2. at least one IK solver is properly implemented on a bone
3. at least one Limit Location or Floor contraint is properly implemented on a bone.
4. the actual action’s definition is dependent on these contraints being in place
and example would be simply to flex an arm from back to forward position by grabbing while it is under the influence of an IK solver
or using the Floor contraint to having the character bend its knees when you press it down against what ever object its pointing to
I’m very sure IK and constraints will not work in the game engine. I can’t say for certain because I’ve not tried yet, but IK is difficult to do in realtime and most constraints are just too heavy to use at runtime.
This isn’t a limitation or bug (except the crashing) in Blender’s game engine either, character animation in games rely’s on baking out the animations at export. Look into the “Bake” feature (in the action editor), I’m not sure what gets baked in but it’s there for that very purpose.
Heck, we’re only just starting to use this stuff on PS3, so don’t complain too much (not that anyone is!)
I’ll look into this some more at the weekend maybe, and post if I find anything useful.
Dear Magic: i know what you are facing, rigging for GE is an annoing task.
IKs doesnt work for the gamengine. You can use IKs, for sure, but just to help you to organize groups of bones.
Take care with bone’s location and orientation. Be sure to know all axis orientations, or you are going to have trouble soon or later, most of it from opening your project inside diferent Blender versions (make sure to make backups when testing your files in diferent versions). Also check the orientation for meshes. I like to make my rigs with bone orientation and mesh orientation pointing the same direction.
Another issue is how you are going to handle dislocation for your character. If you are going to use the armature for that (make it a dinamic actor), stay tunned where the center of your armature is going to be before animating it! <<<About this last issue, I don’t know if the new “change armature center feature” helps here, i need to check it out, if it works is going to be a dream. :spin:
I like to put the center of my armature in the center of the scene (0,0,0), but this is me, your method is up to to you, these are only sugestions…
By the way Erwin is working on character suport.
I think the most important thing for rigging in realtime is know exactly where you are and what you are doing in terms of coordinates. Ctrl A is your friend!
Thanks Thorgal my friend, that makes a lot of good sense. I also found a script on the scripts page that you can use that will allow baking feature to actually work.
