From time to time we will inform the community of certain areas of Skyline Development. If we have decided to add a new features or new demos in development etc we will try to make a post in this topic.Feel free to leave your comments to help encourage out development team ; )

Characters for Skyline

Characters for Skyline

Postby StarFire » 10 May 2015, 16:53

We want to provide for Skyline a wide variety of stock asset character types all with their respective controllers.
There is no way that we could afford to commision any artists to create a variety of characters with animations.
We want the characters to share a large number of animations that should cover most eventualities in game prototyping and character, npc types.

we have found many resources on the web that provide animations and customisable characters but these are outside of our reach. What we would like to do is have one of these customising tools so we can create all of the characters ourselves so they can be provided in Skyline. This could then lead to us having our own character generator inside Skyline for anyone to customise their characters. To do this though we need access to character development tools!

We have the skills to make these characters if we have the correct tools and access to resources.
We would like to ask if anyone in the community can provide access to any character development software and animation resources.

If we have some of these tool we can all have access to characters and for now we could add variations on request, such as zombies, peasants etc.

With funding we could get animations from Mixamo or any other provider, these could be gained over time so as to spread the cost, and purchase or share a license with someone who has any of the following.

Mixamo - animations: https://www.mixamo.com/store/#/
Fuse - character design: https://www.mixamo.com/fuse
Poser Game Dev - character and animation design: http://my.smithmicro.com/poser-pro-game-dev.html

The above packages would speed up the development of characters. To use the more traditional route of modeling package would not be time effective for us.

Look forward to your suggestions, so we can make a variety of free to use Characters in Skyline a reality.

Thanks to Tatty we have we enough content to make the new FPS system a reality which will be started very soon ;)
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby TattieBoJangle » 10 May 2015, 17:42

I have Poser Pro 2014 its not the dev one and im not that good with it lol.
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby StarFire » 10 May 2015, 19:14

Poser 2014 has most of the features of dev version, doesn't have the poly reduction toolset though. Having a tool like this at your disposal everyone will have you on character creation duty lol :P
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby TattieBoJangle » 10 May 2015, 19:16

I just cant animate at all but if anyone else can :)

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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby StarFire » 10 May 2015, 19:20

Its definitely something we are needing, and planning to do for Skylines characters. ;)
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby AuShadow » 10 May 2015, 22:11

There is MakeHuman for a free character generator and I have Mixamo Fuse which is great for generating some characters and I can get 1 or 2 a week or month rigged and animated free, been a while since I looked into it so will do next time I get the chance, first day back at work today so won't be too soon
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby StarFire » 10 May 2015, 22:21

we have just had some success getting characters from the fuse demo into Skyline complete with our base animations, so it does look like a solution. if you do have some rigged characters and dont mind putting them into Skyline we will add the animations :D
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby TattieBoJangle » 11 May 2015, 01:28

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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby AuShadow » 11 May 2015, 10:56

If possible could you guys test a MakeHuman created and rigged character with your animations and if it works, a quick tutorial on it should get a few characters flowing as it seems miximo fuse now longer do the free weekly rigs and I am flat out broke. $1.26 across all my accounts broke, so MakeHuman would be my only real option atm
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby AuShadow » 11 May 2015, 12:27

got this guy, made and rigged a while back with fuse, have him rigged but not animated and a basic zombie slow walk animation

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uploading the walking one to my drive will link when i get a chance



link to zombie file

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_2lAD-RDF1EekgyblNGU1ZPTHc/view?usp=sharing
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby StarFire » 11 May 2015, 13:21

Its a shame these zombies have their animations moving forwards and it makes them very difficult to use. Mixamo has the option of rooting the animation to the spot, which is how Skyline prefers its animations.

Didnt know that fuse has stopped its weekly free rig! whats the point of paying for fuse? Going to have to check this out.

We are giving make human a try today and see if it can be used in a workflow which is time friendly for us. Also looking at daz but from what I can see there is a licensing restriction on characters being used in realtime 3D.

I strongly feel we will find a solution and get a character tool built into Skyline once we can get a good manual workflow to learn from. ;)
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby AuShadow » 11 May 2015, 13:34

Yes Daz3d has many hidden license issues, tried a quick character from MakeHuman today, but it seems to export mesh and skeletal rig separately, the source code for MakeHuman is however freely available so maybe possible to integrate I'm not sure. Will have to see next time I'm on my PC if I can get that same zombie with rooted animation
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby StarFire » 11 May 2015, 14:19

If you do get the zombie rooted sling it over and we can set it up for you. ;)

We have a few tests and will post the results later :D
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby StarFire » 11 May 2015, 21:12

We have been busy testing today and had some very promising results. There may not be a simple solution but we have a found a time effective method to manage characters. Skyline has also behaved herself and made getting the new characters into the scene painless and fun ( wow! I hear you say)

We also grabbed a few mixamo characters and free animations, also added a couple of zombies which will go up on the store(free) when we find some attack anims for them. ;)

Just for fun I quickly did a video for you:


Hope you enjoy :lol:
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby TattieBoJangle » 11 May 2015, 21:20

made my day lol
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby StarFire » 11 May 2015, 21:32

It had to be done lol :lol:
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby lordalmighty1 » 11 May 2015, 22:44

Thomas the tank engine? im getting on in years but im sure that's the music right?!! LOL great vid btw :D
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby SolarPortal » 12 May 2015, 09:40

lol, @LA1: yeah it is, but it is funny lol :P
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby Gtox » 12 May 2015, 13:49

Classic! Like a modern version of thriller.
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby AuShadow » 13 May 2015, 11:11

Checked it out and different for steam and non steam users but now unlimited free autorigs with steam mixamo fuse

Edit: uploading to animate now, once done will send to you guys to include in skyline if you want and can quickly generate similar types, females or completely different, let me know :D

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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby SolarPortal » 13 May 2015, 12:32

Thanks for that AuShadow :) We will have a look into the steam side as mixamo auto rig is a great system for quick rigging that allows animations to work across many characters without much work.

We have had alot of success over the past few days and learnt how to re-target most animations to any rig (ik(most common) or biped(max)) as long as the rigging is of a human biped type. Quadrupeds are a little unknown at this point. We have a few animation sets we can apply to different characters as well Melee, FPS etc...

In the end we are hoping to have a good collection of instantly usable characters that will be made up with scripts for dynamic content with simple drag & drop usability inside skyline :) well that's the plan lol :P

I am sure StarFire will give you more updates as she goes ;)
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby AuShadow » 13 May 2015, 12:35

would be awsome if you guys could have an animation set so to get lots of characters in we would just have to creat, upload and auto-rig, download and then some easy way to add all those animations for skyline :D
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby SolarPortal » 13 May 2015, 12:52

download and then some easy way to add all those animations for skyline

lol, yeah at the moment it is still a lot of work to make them work but if we base the animations on a mixamo rig. in theory it should be able to be added onto the new character(made using mixamo) fairly easily by opening the mesh editor and choosing add animation.

We still have workflow to figure out. But making this process easy for skyline might give us an edge lol :P
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby lordalmighty1 » 13 May 2015, 13:38

act fast maximo fuse is on sale on steam from £75 down to £20 :) if its the same 1?
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Re: Characters for Skyline

Postby StarFire » 13 May 2015, 14:18

Thank guys, we have just purchased it :D

So Skyline should have plenty of default characters very soon and it will be easy for you to get your Fuse character into Skyline and fully dynamic with actions and scripts via the new editor ;)
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