I made a spider model recently and I would like to share some of what I found out in this tutorial. Instead of walking you through step by step in how to make a spider I’m going to show you how to make a simple non-biped character. The key to making a non-biped character is to have 6 bones in your model named according to a certain order so that the internal player code is tricked when it updates the Non Linear Animation. The 6 bones are:

Once those are in your model you can pretty much make any kind of model you want including spider, horses, centaurs, millipede etc….

1. Create 6 bones using the bone type. Make sure and set the width and height to 0.1 in the bones rollout.
2. Rename them to the 6 names above.



 

 

When you go to the select by name screen you should see in your window the following screen.



For the purposes of this tutorial you don’t have to shape your bones any particular way. I was fooling around and did the following.



 

3. Next create 8 dummy objects in your model and name them :

8. Then adjust the pivot point of the bounds box to point the three respective arrows blue up, red left, and green forward making sure to select affect pivot only. How you set this will determine how Torque loads your model.

9. Select the bounds box and hide it. Select all the shapes or boxes you created that are going to be the model’s outside or skin. Then go to the material editor and press on the little button in the bottom picture.

10. That will take you to the following screen and from here choose bitmap. Go and select the bitmap of your choice a 256x256 or 512x512 pixel one is necessary, otherwise the rendering engine will not work well in Torque. If at all.

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11. After selecting the texture that you want,(I included the texture I used in mine as an example) you come to another screen and from here you click a little left up arrow that is right underneath the viewport of the small window.

Click on the "show maps in viewport" button and then open up the Maps rollout. It is one of the top-level rollouts of the material editor if you are lost at this point.

When you have the Maps rollout open check Opacity set it to 70 and check reflection and set it to 22.

12. Next click the "apply material to selected objects button" and close or minimize the material window.

You *should* see the material applied to your shapes/boxes in a viewport and if you don’t then you need to "unwrapUV" it. First make sure you that you are in "smooth + highlights" mode of the viewport, and that the "show materials in viewport" button on the materials screen is pressed. If you are still not seeing the map that was in the material editor applied to your object then it is time to "unwrapUV" it. There are better ways of doing what I’m about to show you but here is a quick and dirty way to do it. Select each object that you applied the material to. Go to the Modify panel and select "unwrapUV". This should cause the map you selected in the material window and applied to the model to show up in the viewport. If this doesn’t please re-read the materials section of the tutorial and double check settings.

13. Okay, when your model has a mapped surface like the one above, or one of your own choosing proceed to the next step which is to create the proper parent-child relationship between the objects in the scene.

Click on New Schematic view underneath Graph Editors and then open it up by clicking on it underneath saved Schematic views which it will now be under.

That will get you to the following screen.

14. From this screen click on the little boxes connected together in the corner which is the link button.

Then link your shapes that you made to the bones. You do this by clicking on the child entity(box or shape in this case) and dragging a dashed line over to a bone (parent entity) that you want to be it’s parent.

Keep repeating this procedure until all of the shapes that you created are children of some bone.

15 Then link up the rest of the boxes so that they look like the following picture.

Here is a list of all the names I have used so far. Bounds is just in the top level and doesn’t have any parents. At least that is the way I do it.

16. Save the model as whatever name you want and now it is time to export the model and see what it looks like in the Show mod of the engine. (torquedemo_debug –show at the command line in the torquedemo directory)

17. Export the model to wherever in the shape directory that you want. Remember to uncheck "collapse transforms" in the parameters box of the exporter. Just be sure to also copy over the texture map(s) to the same directory. If you don’t know how to export a model here is how. First click on the utilities sidepanel (the hammer) and then click the more… button. Select the "DTS exporter utility" and then click Export: Whole Shape button. Make sure and save it to a shape directory.

Here is the beautifully ugly model I made in 30 minutes exported into the Torque Game engine. Hopefully yours looks better than this before you ship the game. J

What you have so far is a model that you could use as a static model if you really wanted to.

Now it is time to make the static model actually do something like move and stuff. So you have your model done and it looks either like mine or nothing like mine the choice is up to you.

1. The first thing that you need to do is to create a sequence object like in the above picture and call it root. This is really really important that you call it root. Trust me on this. What we are doing next is creating the basic animation that your character will display when at rest and not doing anything else.

2. Okay, so you have the root sequence object created and you want to start animating. Here we go. First click on a bone that you want to move. Then click on Auto Key so it turns red and the bar turns red like in the picture below. Then move the sliderbar to a timeframe, say 10 or 20. For our purposes of showing you generically how to do things it doesn’t matter.

3. Then when you are at wherever you want to animate move or rotate the bone that you have selected by however much you want. As soon as you change it a little key will be created at that time mark to show where in time you made changes.

To see what your simple change looks like animated press the play button which is to the right of Auto key button. This should animate your figure and if you don’t see any movement at all please re-read this section and try again.

4. Okay, now you see movement. Cool this is finally what you want to be able to do make your own model shaped the way you want it and able to do what you want with it. Now comes the fun part. Make your model do funny things or move in interesting ways by selecting a bone, sliding the slider bar to the time setting you want, move/rotate it and repeat. Don’t worry about keeping track of where your maximum key setting is. I’ll show you how to figure that out in a moment.

5. Okay. You have played with the animation and are either sufficiently happy with your animation or want to move on. To successfully export this animation sequence that you just made you have to set the limits of the sequence object. Select everything in your scene and make a mental note of when your last animation key is (the little blue bars underneath the slider).

6. Create a new track view and open it up. Both are menu items underneath the graph editor.

Once you have the new track view open navigate on the left hand side until you see the root sequence and expand it. Then expand Object(SequenceII) and click Sequence Begin/End.

7. Then you set the start and end of your animation by selecting add keys under the keys main menu.

8. To set the beginning you now simply click on the dark line at zero, it creates a little key. That just set your beginning of that sequence. To set the end of the sequence you click on the line at the number of your last key or after your last key.

Now if you make a mistake here it is not the end of the world. You can click on keys->move and move keys around until you are happy with it.

9. Okay we are now ready to export to the Torque Game Engine! Yay to you for making it this far.

Now export the model again like you did earlier and also export the sequence to the same directory as the model.

10. Now fire up the Torque game engine with the show mod and load the model that you just created it should now be animated. If it is congratulations! Now this may not seem like a big step towards a horse or weird legged alien but hear me out. Once you can do this you can add as many bones as children to the biped objects and then a mesh or polygon as a child of those bones that you just created. You could make a bouncy armed Letter Y or a walking table. It is really up to you here.

Then export your model to shapes/player/player.dts and this root sequence to shapes/player/player_root.dsq.

2. Then copy over the Player.cs included in the files to the player directory and overwrite the old one only after making sure that you have a backup copy.

3. After that copy the deldso.bat file, which just deletes .dso files, to the example directory where you are running the torquedemo. Double click on this file and it will delete all of your dso files so that you can see the changes you made to the player. Now start up your game and you should see your model that you just created as the player.

4. To animate all the other motions refer to the saved copy of your player.cs file for what to name the sequence object. Naming the sequence correctly is important. I think. I keep it in the same numeric order anyways because I am not a 100% sure if it is the name or sequence number that is important here.

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