3D Mud Client

Actors are models that have a skeleton that can be animated. An example is a dog walking. The following described how you can create your own actors. In Shattered World actors have been created with Milkshape therefore this is the tool that will be discussed.

Skeletons

All actors have a skeleton like the one shown above. Milkshape allows you to build your own skeletons. All actor animations will move the bones of the actor at certain intervals in time. All animations are for a particular skeleton type. All humanoids in Shattered World (such as knights, citizens and archons, grmkels etc) share the same skeleton and therefore all can share the same animations. Most of the animations in the directory:

c:\program files\mudclient\client\actors\animations

are for humanoids such as 'kick.smd' and all humanoids can use this animations. Therefore it is important when make an actor that your skeleton is a standard skeleton if you want to use preexisting animations.

Making a new actor
A good way to make a new actor is to get one that is close to what you want to build and then modify it in Milkshape (eg client\actors\archon\archon.ms3d) That way the skeleton will be standard and you will be able to use preexisting animations for that actor.

Milkshape has vertex manipulation. Notice in the picture below the red dot for the vertex select. This vertex can be moved around changing the shape of the actors forhead:

For basic help regarding vertex and face manipulation refer to the Milkshape beginners tutorial for help:

http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/ms3d/help/htmlfiles/Tutorials/BeginnersGuide.html

After your model is the desired shape you can then texture you actor. A 256x256 texture is often a good idea with one head, 1 leg, 1 arm and one torso such as in the picture below:

The above texture is in the mud client package (file c:\program files\mudclient\client\actors\archon\archon.jpg).

In the texture coordinate editor in Milkshape you can map the vertices to different parts of the texture:

To texture an actors head for example you would select the faces of the head, then go to the texture coordinate editor then click on region and put a box around the head in the texture and then click remap. You should then see that the head part of the texture is projected onto the actor. For more detailed information about texturing a model refer to:

http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/ms3d/help/htmlfiles/Examples/TextureAssign.html

Another way to make an actor is to get a model that has no skeleton then use 'merge' in Milkshape to merge it with an actor that has a skeleton. You can then delete the mesh of the original actor leaving behind the skeleton. You would then scale the new model to be the same size as the skeleton and then you'd attach each of the vertices of the model to the appropriate bones of the skeleton.

Making Animations

Milkshape allows you to animate a skeleton. A way to do it is to get a digital camera and film yourself doing the action you want to animate (eg a kick). You can then go through the animation frame by frame in something like VirtualDub and move the bones of the animation matching frame by frame. Milkshape has keyframes which allows you to only move the bones in a couple of frames (eg the final pose of a kick) and then Milkshape will guess the frames in between. Refer to this tutorial on Milkshape for more information on animation:

http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/ms3d/help/htmlfiles/Tutorials/AnimTutoPart3.html

Once you have finished the animation you can export the animation in smd format and add it to actoranimations. You can then reference the animation in actions.