A non-profit project I did was creating a pack of animations for the players of the game Space Engineers… Labeled Gestures, Custom-made little animation loops that the player can use at the press of a button to convey emotions, role-playing or immersion.
STEAM WORKSHOP LINK
At the present time discontinued due to an update to the rig system that for now, invalidates this mod.
The developers at Keen Software House (KSH for shorts) were kind enough to personally address me, saying they were sorry that the update about to go on, would take down the use of it… Anyways, it’s an alpha game after all. Keeps 25.000 subscribers. Had up to 30.000 when it was running.
KSH did their own little highlight of my mod as a bonus to an update they did, in the early days of modding this game. It still shows up in the Steam Workshop, with a 5/5 star rating…
In a nutshell…
“- Computers don’t create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist.”
John Lasseter
Community suggestion. Thanks to infAl, without him I would not have been able to pack this thing, thanks to my $&%%* grammar and my even more $$&%$@ syntax…
Thanks to Keen’s awesome partnership offer, if you want to help an unemployed in his modding efforts, and some friend of yours doesn’t have Space Engineers yet, let them get it through this link:
http://shop.keenswh.com/?aid=Virakotxa
By Virakotxa.
Gestures will show up in your G menu; at the horizontal scroll where the tools and vanilla gestures are. Move the gesture icon to your toolbar like you would do with any block and activate/loop it, by pressing the assigned numeric shortcut.
The ones labeled with a “Pose” word in their icon, are what I choose to call “pose animation”: As long as you don’t walk (in the ground), your character will stay in it. Also, it can be combined with other gesture animations, and direct mouse manipulation to achieve complex expressions. If you have your jetpack enabled they allow you to fly in that pose, and you can also shoot your weapon and use tools while at (when the position of the right hand allows it). Spinning your view too fast, jumping and crouching will also take you out of the pose. They generally wouldn’t work when sitting in a cockpit.
All the others are your typical gestures: They loop from default pose, to the action, and back to default. They can be combined with poses, they allow all kind of movement without interrupting the animation, but the gesture will only go on for the given time of the expresion before going back to default on their own.
Will keep this file updated with any future Gesture add-ons untill somebody tells me it takes too long to download or something like that, and then we’ll move on to an hypothetical Moves 2.
The order in which they are listed at the “G menu” is by creation time. For a custom order or pick and choose, I’d sugest using the individual files and moving them up and down your load order. Last will show first.
Provide any positive or negative appreciations, feedback and suggestions. Within my taste and capabilities, I’m open to requests.
Túbal Villar - Virakotxa 