Daedalus' Forums

Infact, here's a whole list of every clan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clans_in_V ... Masquerade
http://members.aol.com/silasmcbth/index2.html
http://www.patman.org/wod/clans/wodclans.asp

and of course you can always make up new ones.

As is I believe the clans I've chosen will take quite a while to finish, so I'll be busy for quite a while. Between work and my non stop mmo addiction, it's tough to find time.

[Off topic] MMO eh? Which one? I play EQ2 currently, but I've beta'd a few others. Always find myself returning to EQ2 though.

Well was playin Lotro for about 8 months, then jumped back to City of Heroes, played from launch on that one off and on, also beta ing requiem. Addictive little time suckers. Never did try EQ though:)

I'm curious as to how dependent the shared animations and facial flex/speech system are on the standarized bloodlines skeleton.

From what I have seen, the character models in bloodlines are all the same height. Presumably if I wanted to design a shorter or taller character, I would be running into some serious problems down the road - if I wanted them to use shared poses or speak.

I have done a few experiments in milkshape and max, and it seems that even changing the size of the skeleton slightly has some strange effects.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

The shared animations depend upon the bone rigging and hierarchy of the npc skeleton.

Professional Animation tools will use retargeting algorithms to fit the shared animation to the target skeleton.

These algorithms are mathematically complex. The bone lengths need to be the same for the shared animation and the target skeleton. Changing the bone lengths of the shared animation to match the source skeleton may cause the model to look horrible when retargeted and animated.

The source SDK has a tool that will attempt to remap the motion for you. I tried it and it works but extra work needs to be done to get the skeleton to look right. I was not happy with how my model looked after motion remapping. The eyes and flex animations did not match up but the animation itself did work correctly. I abandoned the use of this tool. Perhaps others may have had better results.

If you look at the Troika models, you will see that the shared animations use less bones than the npc skeleton that uses the shared animation. This is of no consequence since the source engine will create a global bone hierarchy for the two skeletons. It will also remap and translate the shared animations for you when the model is animated. The engine dynamically skins the new pose from the two different skeletons. You can see this amazing effect when you let your npc dance in the game.

Thanks,

You answered my question precisely. The more I find out about how bloodlines was put together, the more complex it seems.

Dkubina, I wonder how is your progress on the new models?

Well here's another character suggestion since Bloodlines takes place in LA I might have figured to have Lucifer (yes the morning star himself) included in there that you run into and talk to? since according to Demon: The Fallen I think he now resides there.