I’ll upload my stuff there. For older stuff also try looking for “m1stermorden”.
This whole mess comes at an inopportune moment as lately my motivation for SFM has been low anyway. Perhaps once the community has found a new popular spot to migrate (personally I don’t like twitter for this) I’ll set up something proper again. Click Read On for a few thank yous.
bethesda fucking over osbidian 8 years ago in the production of fallout new vegas with most underhanded and frankly pointless ways, resulting in obsidian’s loss of the fallout IP, bankruptcy, and general obscurity within industry
but then obisidian coincidentally popping back up in the midst of bethesda class-action lawsuits for illegal business practices coinciding with the most publicized awful game debut in 10 years with a new RPG IP that has all the themes and writing and care that bethesda’s been ignoring for 8 fucking years
Remember that SFM is an
awful program and if you want to really get into animation, you should
use something better like blender, c4d, 3dsmax, maya, etc.
That
being said, constraints are a nice way to make SFM just a little less
garbage and might convince you to postpone switching to something better
if you’re an imbecile like I am.
Aim Constraint Basics
This
is how you apply an aim constraint. Left-click on the parent bone
first, then left-click on the child bone. The child bone will rotate to
face the parent bone.
This is how it looks in practice.
You
might notice that when you apply this constraint, a new DAG appears in
the list. This is a slider that affects the weight of the constraint, on
a scale of 0-100%.
Here,
I’ve applied an additional aim constraint to the templar’s neck and 3
spine bones, and adjusted the weights to produce this:
You can see that the bones with lower slider values don’t rotate as much to follow the bone they’re constrained to.
Aim Constraints for Eye Movement
Aim
constraints can be used to create a viewtarget for non-qc eyes, which
makes moving them around a whole lot easier compared to manually
positioning them.
This isn’t any different than what I showed
above, but you might have to manually position the eyes’ initial
position so they’re looking directly at the viewtarget before you apply
the constraint.
Parent Constraints for Impromptu Shapekeys
Parent
constraints are basically locks that can be toggled on & off. By
applying a parent constraint to a bone, moving it, and then messing with
the weight slider, you can basically create a shapekey from scratch.
This
is pretty useful for eyelids and eyebrows, since SFM tends to have
trouble interpolating very small position adjustments between keyframes,
but has no problem interpolating different slider values.
Using Inheritence to Bypass Aim Constraint Limitations
Normally,
objects that are under an aim constraint cannot be rotated. There’s a
way around this, and it has to do with how objects inherit motion from
whatever they’re locked to.
Here’s
a quick hierarchy of bones on a regular biped in sfm. If you move
the neck, the head moves as well. You move spine2, it moves the neck and
head as well, and so on.
(empty.mdl
is what I use for this. It’s essentially just an invisible model with
one bone. You can use whatever you like as long as you hide it
afterwards.)
Place a new model at the exact same position as the head. Lock the head to this new model, then lock the new model to the neck, creating the hierarchy above.
By
applying the aim constraint to this intermediary bone instead of the
head, and having the head inherit its (constraint-based) movement through a lock, you;’re
able to bypass this limitation of aim constraints, allowing you to both
rotate the head and have it track something as if it were constrained.
This release contains all of my Halo: Reach model ports and something new… The UNSC Army! Like the Spartans, I made all of the variants seen in the game, with each allowing for further customization with armor pieces. There’s several head options available, each coming with options for skin tone and eye color, as well as hair color for the females.
Pretty literal representation of how I’ve been feeling the past month. Probably the past 2 years. I don’t know how long its been since I’ve actually posted anything (other than a reblog earlier) I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve actually worked on a model. Things have just got so busy and hectic and stressful. I’m tired literally all the time. I’m stress ALL day. I’m depressed. I sit and look at the screen for a good 30 minutes before realizing I haven’t touched anything. I don’t know what to do anymore. It’s work every day… and nothing else. Something needs to change, and it needs to change soon. Maybe with the new year coming… Here’s hoping.