Main Character's FSM

This is a first approach to the main character's FSM

Create Your Character!!!

Name: Unknown

As promised, here is a newer (creepier) version of our main character. Originally he wasn't supposed to be creepy at all, but I really like how it turned out.

Continue?

We are very glad to report that finally we figure out how to load animated models into XNA (actually we now know two different ways of doing so). It took us far more time than we intended, but we learned a few things in the process. OK, first things first, animated models in XNA come in two flavors: .fbx and .x (as far as we know). If you're using Maya then you will be glad to hear that it already comes with a fbx exporter (just remember to enable it in the Plug-in Manager), however you won't be so glad to hear that it doesn't let you define the start and end frames of each animation (more on this later). If, however you are really passionate about x, we found a good x exporter written in Python (download and install instructions here). This exporter lets you define animations which comes really in handy if you decide to take the SkinnedModelProcessor path. We mentioned before that we found two ways of importing animated models into XNA, obviously the SkinnedModel is one, the other one being using the XNA Animation Component Library.

Each approach has its pros ands cons. The Skinned Model is really simple to use (just remember to change your model's Content Processor to SkinnedModelProcessor after adding it to the project) and it supports both fbx and x, but here's the tricky part, remember how Maya wouldn't let you define different animations on your fbx file? well the SkinnedModelProcessor relies on these animations names to know where to start and stop, so if you just use your Maya generated model you will only have access to one (massive) animation (usually named something like 'Take_001") containing all of the model's animations. One way to go around this is to manually edit the file (provided it is an ascii fbx) or writing a script that does this for you. Another (simpler) way is to just use an x file.

Alternatively, you could choose to use the Animation Component Library, which is just as easy to use, but a little bit trickier to set up. Apparently it only supports x files, and you have to create an XML file detailing the animations. A really cool feature is that it lets you blend different animations together, which saves you some work and helps them look more realistic. However it has its disadvantages. Firstly, for some reason it wouldn't accept my Maya generated x files, so I had to create my model using a combination of MilkShape 3D, LithUnwrap and Character FX (which turned out to be a bit tedious), it seems to use some deprecated methods and I couldn't get it to apply lighting to my model.

Because of all the above, we decided to use the SkinnedModelProcessor for our game. I hope this brief recap of our adventures through the world of XNA and models helped you in case you were stuck.

(By the way, I'm gonna try to make a decent main character model now that we are sure we will be able to use it).