Vondell's Current Projects

[(Designer)Vondell]

My plan is to give it a wooden climbing toy at the least, since a red panda that stays on the ground is barely a red panda at all.

 

I'm interested in letting it cohabitate with the Giant Panda since they share the same location naturally, but I don't know if the Giant Panda would allow an unfamiliar animal in its exhibit, or an unfamiliar toy? The game's Giant Pandas are not programmed as social animals. Their families will both be "Raccoon" though. I'll look into that later. Still many animation sets to do.

 

This one's gonna have a lot more unique animations than the tortoise does, almost as many as the game's Giant Panda has. I think a lot of the game's Giant Panda animations are left unused, though. The Giant Panda has a vertical "climb" animation, but I can't figure out what it would be programmed to climb? I put some in a zoo of mine and I've been keeping an eye on their actions but I haven't seen half of the animations that are present in its file.

[jbl89]

I think there might be a recommendation about incompatibility, but I don't think it would cause many issues. That's both for the animal, and for the toy. You can only fix that if you update the panda's .AI-file, but that could cause conflicts.

 

I'll see if I can spot anything about climbing for the Giant Panda. Update: no. The animations are there, but not used in any behavior set. Maybe it was also meant at some point to interact with a toy. Yesterday, I did my own version of making the Arctic and Gray wolf use their official swimming animations (there was a hack around, but now the animals don't stand at water when you move them. Also trying to come up with something for the Mexican Gray Wolf).

[(Designer)Vondell]

It's interesting, the Panda's climb animation has its shadow the same distance under the panda throughout it, which would've looked noticeably odd if it was climbing vertically even for a single play's length of time. The shadow would've climbed with it. It seems like that was ditched pretty early on. I wonder what it would've climbed that would've needed a looping vertical climb animation instead of the usual fixed animation for object interactions. Tall trees? That remains a mystery I guess.

 

Interesting that so many unused animations ended up left in the official files.

[jbl89]

Well, Blue Fang was very sloppy indeed. Maybe it was their style, or the deadlines were too tight. If you look at the strings that are still left in the game (and which were often already present in the beta version which got on the internet), or at some of the graphics that are indeed left...

Really excited about your red panda, although I can't wait to try the tortoise either! :D

[pukkie]

oooh finally :post-1551-1124418072: :post-1551-1124418072: :post-1551-1124418072: :post-1551-1124418072: the red panda of my dreams :wub:

 

I love it dreams of the snowy owl as next project

[bonobo]

He looks lovely! The animation looks very smooth and natural. Shame those gorgeous stripes aren't as visible with it so small!

[(Trustee)ZooGrammy]

It's exciting to have discussions of making new animals!!

[(Designer)HENDRIX]

Really appreciate the work you're doing! I've never been much of a ZT1 modder myself, though.

 

Incase you're interested, I wrote some tools that allow importing complete ZT2 animals with all animations into blender, so that'd reduce the workload for such a project immensely. Then it's down to "only" rendering the sprites and coding it. Works only with the old blender, though: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B442QuWePTBnb0ctdmg1MncwYUE&usp=sharing

[jbl89]

HENDRIX: In case you're talking about converting ZT2 models into ZT1 models... I think you can only do that for personal uses. As for distribution, I think it might violate copyright laws.

[(Designer)Vondell]

HENDRIX, good to see you around here! I love your ZT2 work although I don't have ZT2 to actually play around with it. Your animal modding/rigging/animation video tutorials have been immensely helpful to me.

 

I've thought about just plugging ZT2 animals into Blender and rendering them out, and might give it a try sometime, but at the moment I'm enjoying just creating everything myself purpose-built. You wouldn't know it by looking at the resulting sprites, but a lot of animations have to be simplified and exaggerated before they're even properly visible in ZT1.