Here's a collection of notes/tips from my recent experiences with using these two tools.

CCC's AnimConverter:
- It only deals with normalizing bone lengths between skeletons (distance of parent bones to child bones), but doesn't account for relative distances between sibling bone nodes.

- The main place you can see this issue is on the faces of models between HUM_F/HUM_M.  CCC's tool will get rid of facial dimension deformations since it fixes the bone lengths, but you will notice that the eyelids, pupils, and jaw are still in the wrong position or missing entirely (either not showing, mouth open, or jaw missing )

- This is because the distance between the eyes, eyelids, and jaw (all sibling bones of the "head" bone) is different - HUM_M has a larger/longer face model than HUM_F. 

- To fix this:
1. After running CCC's tool open up the default bind pose for the destination skeleton.  For example, if you're converting to HUM_M, convert and open up HUM_M.skeleton.xml - will refer to this as the "reference animation" from here on out.

2. Open up both XMLs.  In the first section of your new animation (bones), replace the position sub-blocks (only those 3 lines, not rotation or anything else!) with the info from the reference animation:
a. Bip01 Blink
b. Bip01 Eye_Look
c. Bip01 Jaw

3. Note that the default bind pose has eyes closed.  If you want the eyes open, then use some other animation's bind pose (like LFIST2) as the reference animation.

Retimer
This mainly concerns bugs and quirks about Retimer.

1. Retimer has trouble doing more than one thing in one session - for instance, if you want to cut and retime in the same session, it'll do one or the other or not do what was expected. 

If you need to do more than one thing on an anim, it's probably best to do thing #1, save, quit and reload retimer, and then do thing #2, etc.

2. Doing cuts doesn't change the animation length field - you will have to do that manually.

3. Occasionally, it'll leave keyframes whose timestamps are past the animation end point.  This causes issues with animcombine (it'll combine correctly, you'll just get stray frames at points), and maybe also with TL2/GUTS/OGRE.  To fix that, double-check the end timestamps and do an additional cut if necessary.

So still being on my "create new animation" binge, here's something neat I cooked up, armed with a calculator (that is, some manual editing), animcombine, and retimer - Flipkick!

https://2.sendvid.com/u1ddu0tn.mp4

The kick part took the most recalculating/edits, but it wasn't too bad, just lots of trial and error.

(Showing it's not always necessary to have 3dsmax/blender to make animations  )

Edit:
Based on the same kick anim, a quick mock-up of a wow-inspired spinning crane kick (TBH, the pose needs to be reworked, but whatever =P)  (also particles are derived from warchief class)

https://3.sendvid.com/2cynxcvt.mp4

thanks

the first backswing then forward swing is what im thinking of

i tried the combined animations but theres is a weird delay between the swings
im wondering if the swings can come one after the other

i noticed in the timer for the combined version the 2nd swing comes really late after the 1st swing
making it look odd when you spam it.

also thanks again for helping me out 

Retimer to cut/speed up stuff might be what you're looking for   The delay probably comes from the combo of the swing recovery of the first anim, and the swing "warmup" of the second.

Of course, none of that compares to having custom anims made by Anarch 

Edit: Cut the last 0.22s from the first, and the first 0.22s of the second (and shift the second back by -0.22s).  Speed up both by 1.5x (so the resulting anim is 0.75s long.
 

Thanks again Khaz. Yes the flow is helpful

Of course   It's basically the outline for a batch file, should you choose to use one. 

I usually view the animation in OGRE Mesh Viewer, take note of the important frame numbers and write up the [ANIMATION] defs from there

That's a good way, and everyone has their own style . For me, I use a calculator to do transforms on the original keys  .  Works well enough!

Awesome work, Anarch!     Can't wait to see it in-game!

(continuing from another thread - [Link])

Here's a utility to combine XML skeletal animations, and it should work without deforming the animations even if the bind poses of those animations are different.

It's currently a command-line program, and if there's enough interest in it or requests for it, I can make a GUI version of it.

You can specify up to 32 inputs (even duplicating some inputs if you want to repeat some animations).

Enjoy!

it's permanent until you die

Hi Sephia - it's intended to persist until destroyed or until you die.

The counterbalancing factors are (1) it increases blight per cast, and (2) Tier 1+ elemental shields are random on every cast, so if you don't get the element you want, recasting it again costs blight, mana, and time.  It's especially noticeable if you have to recast it in combat after the shield expires due to damage.

Reposting this report from snailz over at Steam...

Quote from: snailz

Parry is bugged. I currently have a 2-handed wrench and when i succesfully parry i do about 18k damage everytime.

It didn't immediately strike me as just another mod-conflict thing, so I thought I'd bring it over here...

Wondering if this is due to that exploit we fixed a few builds back, but the numbers seem smaller than they should be in that case.

Lack of context makes me unsure, though.  I think we need more details...