2W - Citizens

9/16/2020  UPDATE, So recently I decided to go in another direction with this. I have deleted the project to avoid any possible conflicts down the road that may occur. Sometimes we tend to perpetuate errors as we fold project x into project xyz.. Anyway rest assured, I want to release a project that is fundamentally sound so although I don't have to start from scratch , it may take awhile to reach a version worth releasing..  This was always just a prototype and the aim was for people to preview the anims to see if they liked it.. The finished project will be similar to the prototype in appearance,, just implemented differently..  Thank you for your interest in this.

**** THIS IS A PROTOTYPE *****

 This is my first endeavor into animations and has taken a year and then some to reach this point. As you can imagine, this has been a learning process with many bumps in the road. I'd like to think that my skill has improved in that time and perhaps this may be apparent in my earlier animations on this model. They were pretty much done in the order listed on the aurorabase, walks and runs being among the first. I intend to revisit the walks as I see they are a little stiff.
  I reached a point where I want to correct errors that I have surely missed. Looking for anything not working properly as far as the animations are concerned. Note, that I have taken some liberties in my interpretation of some of the anims but I'll leave those for you to discover. I have included a txt doc that notes all the animations and anything noteworthy about it.
This being an npc, it will not include all animations although I can certainly add to it over time. Currently it does not support: head tracking, mounted anims, special weapons, cloaks (I'm sure there's other stuff). So aesthetics aside, please report anything that does not work in a proper way.

This project is in conjunction with my Two Worlds placeables release. The goal is to have a wide variety of citizens/commoners to populate your world doing mundane tasks with new animations. As of now, the skeleton and mesh are 1 model but this is temporary and for testing purposes. When final, the goal is to make the skeleton a supermodel, and all skinned models reference it.

In this prototype you have "NPC_Citizen_01" for your viewing pleasure in the toolset. Also included are a couple of hairstyles, hats and headdress under the appearance tab via wing nodes(bottom of list) . I will denote these better in the next iteration. All these will be expanded upon for further customization. Another future goal to further customize this npc is to find a way to colorize the clothing, hair and maybe skin via shaders without plt. This feature is beyond my skills and hopefully I'll be able to recruit some help with this. This model also includes "special walks" that currently is only accessible via scripting. I intend to find an easy way to showcase these in the module noted below.


All animations were made using the Character Animation Toolkit (CAT) in 3dsmax. Being a novice I resorted to many techniques to making each animation. From blocking to mocap to just moving everything around until it looked good. No one technique fits all situations. The sources for mocap are Mixamo, CMU, Mocap UTD. I'd also like to thank Milos Cerny and his excellent CATrig tutorials and discord channel.

Included is a module by Nereng aptly named the "The Animation Lab". Thanks to Jasparre, the module has been updated to EE compatibility to take advantage of new custom slots.
The module has many features for testing and I encourage you to read the readme by Nereng that I included in the download. You can test any model that has a resref, including it's sounds also. To test my npc, you can simply log in as a DM and take over my npc standing by the sign. Or you can log in as a player and more properly utilize the modules scripts to test. Be sure to read the signs in the module for further clarafications.


Credit where Credit is due:

 Obviously the original creators of Two Worlds, Scanti for making a commandline.exe that converted native format to obj., and Merricksdad for super-tweaking that same program and greatly reducing my workflow. Also the whole discord group for answering many questions. OMB for CleanModels.