The standard human biped rig is meant to provide a way for 3D artists to more easily get their characters into the Ember game client and using a full range of animations for all the gameplay current actions. It should also eliminate the need for individual animation work to be done per character. Any work done to the main humanoid rig to add new animations or improving existing ones will propogate to all biped characters that use the same rig.

Known Limitations - This system will only work for characters of roughly the same height, if the distance between the root and the hip bone are too great there might be some sliding issues as the hip is a primary point of translation from the static root bone, in this case retargeting to a different skeleton would be necessary. Dwarf chracters for instance will likely need to use their own skeleton. Ideally I would like a way to minimize this or make retargeting for the new hip translation as painless as possible.

Files:

humanoid_rig.blend - This is clean version of the rig in blender format and is the recommended way to attach the rig to your characters if you are using Blender as it has no extra data. The rig is in a standard T-Pose in both edit and pose mode.

complete_anims.blend - This contains the complete set of animations in one blender file provided saves the time of having to make your own, this is used to generate a new game ready humanoid.skeleton and when animation tracks are updated they should be re-imported here so that it is up to date. The male settler is provided as the Ogre Exporters will not produce a skeleton without a mesh attached, this should not be used to produce the male settler final mesh file, instead use the one located in "../biped/male/source/male_body".

base_t-pose.fbx - The same as the biped_rig except provided in FBX format so that users of other 3D software can import the rig directly without needing to process it with Blender. This format has become the most commonly used and supported over the years and tends to give better overall results in testing then either BVH and DAE.

humanoid.skeleton - This is the most current game ready version of the humanoid.skeleton which is loaded by Ember to drive character models.

Directories:

Each animation action is broken into a number of directories based on their type. Translations are actions where the character moves in the world like walking or running, actions are animations that represent specific gameplay actions like chopping a tree or fishing, gestures are typically used for idle movements, simple emotes, or blended with other animations to achieve variations. 

Each animation is saved in its own file so that it can be individually edited over time. These are saved in FBX format which most 3D software can import. I had originally intended to use BVH but it was not honouring roll modifications to bones and this could have caused issues in areas like the hands where it often needed to roll the bones to a more natural alignment. Some game systems prefer each animation to be a separate file and it will be easier to process these individual files for those systems. Ember uses one main skeleton file and each animation is handled as a separate track within that file.

More information, including videos will be provided in the future on how to use and extend this library for your own characters.

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions feel free to contact Dean Bouvier < demarii.wf at gmail.com >