Dragon: The Ghoul2 Animation Tool

-1- General Information

To put it simply, Dragon is an animation creation and editing tool for the Ghoul2 animation file format, .gla, used in both Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (hereafter referred to as JKA). It's primary purpose is to create animations and write them in to the .gla format, which can then be merged with the existing JKA animations (or other .gla files) for use in-game with little knowledge needed.

Dragon has been created on a machine utilizing an AMD Duron 950, 256 MB ram and an ATI Radeon 9200 videocard, which is a fairly low-end system by today's standards. As such, most computers should be able to handle Dragon program smoothly (but, because of Dragon's avatar system, it is possible to put too much strain on any system.)

Dragon features:

• A drag-able and transparant UI
• An Avatar system
• A Console to do nifty things!
• A Complete Bone List to animate
• A Standard model
• A few example animations
• Light Saber Rendering (extremely nifty)
• Weapon Rendering (blasters rockets etc)
• A floor tile, for better animations
• Save and load system
• A blending option
• And probably much more

The current release (0.1.0) is just a .zip file - you will need a program such as WinZip or WinRAR to extract Dragon. When you extract Dragon, it is important that you keep the folder hierarchy as it is in the .zip file. If you extract Dragon to C:\, the program will be in C:\Dragon\ All you'd need to do is navigate to that folder using Windows Explorer and double-click Dragon.exe. As of 0.1.0, Dragon has a default model that is loaded using the default Avatar, so you should see a shiny little guy, ready to animate.

Ok, you've gone through the trouble of downloading Dragon, extracting it, and running the core executeable - now what?

You should see a shiny little gray dude, a box that says "BoneList" and a box that says "SliderBox". Below the gray dude is a little stick thing, made of a white, green, and blue sticks. You still with me? Cool.

Let's focus on the BoneList, since it's basic use is pretty easy. You see a list of bones - model_root is in the middle - the active bone is dislplayed in the middle of this box. You can click on any of the bones listed above or below to switch to those bones - as you change bones you will notice that the stick thing (the white, green, and blue sticks mentioned earlier) change position and orientation.

Ok, now you're ready to do some fun stuff. See that slider box that you've been itching to mess with? This is the heart of Dragon - You have several things in here that are noteworthy - a Reset Button (completely obliterates any posing you've done of the current bone), and two sets of 'Sliders'. The sliders on the left are the important ones - the ones on the right we'll get to in a minute.

Go ahead and select the r_femur_YZ bone in the BoneList. Next, click on the green slider on the left - and hold your mouse down - and move your mouse left or right. You should see the gray guy's leg swing back and forth. You can now try moving the blue slider - his leg will sway from side to side.

Getting from here to making a cool stance is actually pretty easy - it's like playing with GI Joes, or some such action figure - you just pose the model how you want it. It might take some getting used to, but you're on your way :)

Dragon uses a console, designed to be somewhat familiar to people who've played a game based on the Quake3 engine. First up to bring down the console press ` (you may need to enter ASCII code 0126).

Console Commands:


















The Avatar System is one of the more robust components of Dragon. With it, you can animate multiple models at once, bolt models to those model's bones, change the saber's color, and length. So, how to access this advanced functionality?  Listen well, young traveller, for a world of infinite possibility awaits those with a steady hand and an open ear.

Dragon, in 0.1.0b, comes with "avatar/default.cfg".  (Now might be a good time to set Notepad to be the default editor for .cfg's, if it isn't already.) Opening that file shows:


The syntax is fairly similar to .shader file format, so skinners won't be at a total loss here. There are three main, must-have parts of an avatar file, the 'org', the 'gla', and the 'glm' lines. Oh, and the 'skin' line is fairly important. That said, a basic template to follow for creating new avatars would be:


The org line has three floating point values past it. These tell Dragon where you want to draw the model at. This is useful because adding multiple models would be confusing if they all were at the '0.0 0.0 0.0' location. The gla line has a filename after it. By default it is _JAhumanoid.gla, which is a really small, single frame animation file that contains all of the skeleton file info. The glm line has a filename after it. This can be any .glm file, it is highly recommended that it be a .glm that was made to work with the gla you've selected. The skin line points to a skin file specifically created for the glm that you have selected. As of 0.0.1b, not loading a .skin file results in a crash.


So the reason u downloaded dragon was not to read allot of crap but to get urself some animations done! So here we go! This is much easier than u think, Thanks to dragon. Its not hard either. Ive just written allot of text so it would be clear First we create our workspace.  Extract /models/players/_humanoid/ (assets1.pk3) to a easy to find place. I've created:

"C:/Base/Models/Players/_humanoid/"

NOTE: /Base/ has to be there. if not ull get errors Check the _humanoid folder, see if u can see the .gla and the animations.cfg files. Now download GLAmerge written by Ask.

Now, create your animation in Dragon.  That's easier said than done, right? Well, once you have a completed animation, you can move on to the next step.

However, before you export to the .gla format, there are a few things to consider - for one, have you saved the file (save command), so you can edit the original animation later? If so, excellent. save, then savegla - I think a good idea would be to automatically save when savegla is called - this could be done for the next release - any thoughts?

Ok, now the tricky part is that you'll need the very first frame of animation be empty - it technically doesn't matter, but you need to understand that this buffer needs to be there because other animators, using packages like XSI and 3dsMax, weren't able to keep the skeleton in-tact when exporting to gla and merging, unless they had made the first frame of their animations the base pose, otherwise the animation could not be successfully merged in with glamerge. Dragon does maintain the skeleton's structure, but uses the same merging program as everyone else.

Anyway, the tricky part is that Dragon currently has a blending system that 'wraps' around the animation - if the last frame of animation has blended bones in it, they blend with the first frame. This helps with walk cycles, but makes exporting to gla format pretty tricky. Since 'unblending' bones does not destroy their position, save your animation, then unblend each bone of the first and last frames, then finsb on frame 0 - you should now have a blank frame 0 and the rest of the frames are working fine - but, because Dragon is finicky about frames, cycle through all the frames before you export. You're ready to export - lucky you!

To export, enter the console and put in

savegla YOURFILENAME

(do not append .gla, Dragon does this already.) Ok, you're done with Dragon, go ahead and exit (you did save, right?)

In the folder where Dragon is located, you will find YOURFILENAME.gla - copy the .gla to the humanoid folder mentioned earlier. Than create a new text document. In that document type the following:


This is a basic setting. replace <gla> with whatever your gla is called. i got this: @ECHO OFF "glamerge.exe" "_humanoid.gla" "my_run.gla" -o PAUSE EXIT (if u are an advanced modder, see the readme of glamerge for more options) Save the txt file as gla_merge.txt Now rename the file to gla_merge.bat (the .bat file tells the program what files to merge) now double click on the .bat file (make sure the following files are in the _humanoid directory. Glamerge, _humanoid.gla, your GLA.) It should now ask u for an output name. I suggest humanoid.gla (NOT _humanoid.gla!). Because this way u can rename the humanoid.gla or delete it when it isnt good while keeping the original (of course its just a copy of the original located in assets1.pk3). But for now lets do new.gla Now create the same directory somewhere else (no need for /base/ now) c:/models/players/_humanoid/ copy the other _humanoid files and paste them here. delete everything except Animations.cfg and new.gla Now rename new.gla to _humanoid.gla. Open up the animations.cfg with good old notepad. Now find the running animation. (U can use modview) k now its time for some small time scripting (not 2 hard dont worry) Now uve found the animation u want to replace BOTH_RUN1 12305 26 0 40 (name) (beginframe) (frames) (loop) 40(framespeed) K now. we have to leave the name the same. Now we find out what the last frame is, if u scroll down a bit ull see that ROOT is the last frame on frame: 21374 and it lasts 2 frame wich comes to a total of 21376.Now we know what to fill in the first, now for the second. How many frames is your animation? really simple if u've paid attention when gla merge was busy you shouldve noticed it counted the frames So there. I got 20 frames. Next is wether u want it too loop or not. 0 = yes, -1=no. We have a running anim so i would say 0, yes. And finally the framespeed. This one u can set whatever u like. in dragon the speed was 20 and i liked it so ill use 20 There we're done analyzing. So lets do this ! BOTH_RUN1 21376 20 0 20 Ahh yes were done! Pack /models/players/_humanoid/ in a .pk3 (the same way u would pack a skin) and place it in your base. Launch JKA. play a game and look at your new animation! NOTE: your next animation has to start on a different frame, see the last frame is 21376, plus the 20 frames u used wich would become 21396 I hope u get the point. Delete the .pk3 and yer jka is back to normal, Isnt it simple? Its only simple thanks to Dragon:The Ghoul2 Animation Tool


If you need help or got questions or want to report a bug (TO SQUASH!) you can contact Wudan on the following ways:

Mt-Wudan
Dragon Forum
Mail: Wudan07 -AT- gmail.com
Aim: Wudan07

Remember! Report Bugs As soon as u find them! And also please fill in the crash/bug form included! You are able to control how good the next version will be if u go on bug-hunting or if u think of things that could be improved