Character Prerequisites

There are two ways to animate a character in Golaem Crowd. Either trough the animation engine (Motion Behavior or Locomotion Behavior) or thanks to baked fbx animation through the Geometry Behavior. 

To be able to use a character within the Golaem Crowd with the animation engine , it should respect the following rules:

  • it should be a skinned character on an animation joint skeleton
  • all features used for rigging and skinning should be able to be exported correctly to a non-baked FBX file. If this is not the case, Golaem Crowd will not be able to find all needed information in the reference FBX file at rendering.
  • the skeleton should be a hierarchy of bones corresponding to a regular biped or quadruped morphology (i.e. it should contain two pairs of links which stand for arms and legs, separated by a spine, a head, and eventually a tail). Extra joints can be animated thanks to a geometry behavior (to replay baked fbx motion) but will not be taken into account by the animation engine
  • all the bones of the hierarchy must be connected together (directly or via transform nodes)
  • The upper member joints are the hierarchical children of the bust (and not of the neck!)
  • Golaem Crowd should be able to find a regular T pose, through on of the following methods:
    • In the bind pose or a given pose
    • At a given frame
    • From the current values of orientation/translation of the bones of the skeleton
    • From the joint orient (current values not using the transform nodes)

Note that except for the T-Pose at a given frame, the character DOES NOT HAVE to be in T-Pose, all that Golaem Crowd needs is to be able to compute a T-Pose from the given information

  • A regular T pose corresponds to:
    • standing posture
    • head must look towards the horizon
    • outstretched arms, parallels to the transverse plane, with hands face down (for biped)
    • outstretched hand fingers, in the continuation of the arm bone
    • feet in rest pose, with both the heel and the phalanges on the ground
    • outstretched legs. First bone and last bone of the leg must be in the same plane, which must be parallel to the coronal plane 
The following figure describes the different planes of the body used to describe the location of body parts in relation to each other:
 
The following figure shows a valid skeleton T pose:
Valid skeleton T-Pose