Where it began:

I've hammered away for a few years now, navigating the TGE art pipeline and assembling a very robust, lowcost toolbox. I've discovered how to do some things out of Milkshape3d that remained elusive; until enough devoted time was invested into the project...the rexults were published at my personal pages some time ago.

My career in showbusiness has allowed me to travel [and meet/greet with George Lucas in Japan] while working; then settle down locally and continue making a living as a journeyman stagehand with I.A.T.S.E. in the San Francisco Bay Area. Here, I've worked on Television[Nash Bridges], Feature Films[some you've probably seen], and many, many live performances of every conceiveable type[last major was Sony PS3]. I've toured Rock-n-Roll, operated a spotlight with the SF Ballet, was careTaker for well over 300 robotic lighting fixtures; I've managed to do quite a bit of different things...

After having a ton-o-Fun with those endeavors, I started to become facinated with MODing game engines after playing HL and UT. I got involved with a UT MOD Team that produced the TotalConversion Badlands ontop the v436 build of the Unreal engine. I finally got to sneak out from behind the velour drapery and do some voice files for the Taunt sytem. I've been working in 3d and TGE ever since! I didn't need to learn the UT scripting, but since TGE was all new to me, I decided to concentrate on learning that and utilize TGE as my 3D playSpace; since the art pipeline is about the easiest to work.


I may not be some 'pie-in-the-sky' Indy developer...I just get things done, ;), and have my fun. Afterall, isn't that what this is all about, anyways?

Cheers. Oh, BTW...the Popularity rating is dependent upon Kudos and other mechanisms...you'll find, so please leave a Kudo or something that helps the ole Profile out! Thanks!

Most Recently: targetedProjectiles

:)

Very Recently: ragDoll in fragMO

Here you'll see the first few IK ragDoll effects I recently poured from Vat#17 down in the Plant...heh, heh.... I discovered a nice, new pipeline to get the coolest IK animation data out to Torque and .DSQ format and into the Torque Game Engine.

In the Past

I have great things in store...Kork? Milkshape?? Hhhhhmmm....doable. LOL.

This wouldn't really take all that much effort. It would come down to the time needed in weighting with the SIM2 plugin.

Things have certainly moved along on the lowEnd content front, and I am hoping that fragMO can get a DTS/DSQ exporter working eventually. Just getting the imageCaching 'attachment' system working like Torque's was a big help. That program is like a cross between ShowToolPro and Milkshape. Very fun to work in, and it got a lot more fun when the keyFrameSliders were introduced.



This should be an image of the dialog. As a standard of the UI, the schema worked much like ms3d; in that you affect the change via input field and an Invoke button, or by Viewport context. This made it so that the UI needed to be split at the least, and necessitating many extra keystrokes and loss of view detail. I had sent the author a little html package of various animation controllers I've been exposed to and I think the resulting dialog may have some seed of influence there. It seems to be still under development, but it makes posing very quick, having all 3 vectors in a very small space with other controls available[CoordinateSystem, etal]. It would be great to have it permanently mounted to the Keyframe Editor or the Tool panel, where the current schema is accessed. We'll see how it developes along...



The baseHuman Project

The baseHuman Project is the Heavy Industries version of a biped animation puppet. It will be a normal humanSized physique, unlike the KORK playerAvatar. I intend to include many logically positioned and rotated Nodes for mounting of images and objects inside the Torque Game Engine. I will be using the default namingConvention utilized by the SDK for Nodes and Skeleton, and will base the animations to be generated upon the standard TGE playerAvatar .DSQ sequences.

Here, in the snapshot, you'll see that work has begun in fragMOTION on the Project. This is close to what the 'Kork' physique's Root sequence would look like, if you put a 'human' into the 'Root' pose. The M16-A weaponImage is compliments of NetGeos, with some Heavy Industries voodoo[werk!] to get it to become a true mountable DTS shape. At present, the Image of the M16-A is actually a cached Image, much like a ShapeBaseImage object; it's not really in the fragMOTION Scene[and will not export as an object]. My mount0 Node has a fragMO 'attachment' object linked to it. With this attachment object, comes a few parameters you can specifiy. CharacterFile is the path to the file. Also, somewhat like ShowToolPro, you can specify an Animation sequence name and render any frame you like! Origin specifies which Node in the Image object you would like to use for the mounting transform....very nice, indeed.

...more to follow, as it developes!

• fragMOTION
• Original Rex Heavy Industries
• UTv436: Badlands