47 replies to this topic

[Koniving]

I would love to try my own hand at animating...
But any time I try to split the parts of a mech in order to map it to my own skeletons all three of my programs crash.

If anyone's willing to share them pre-rigged to a skeleton that I could use in max, cinema 4D, or Blender or just split into separate objects rather than as one single object (which is what's causing my programs to crash), I'd love to try my hand at it since I haven't done it 'seriously' since like 2009.

Personal favorites: Highlander jump (especially the landing animation) and the Panther.... seeing the Lord's Light as it is charging up is a beautiful sight that I hope to recreate with my MW5 mods..
(So disappointing to hear that MW5 isn't gonna feature brand name variants, just "upgrades"... Yay...another medium laser ++++...)

[Koniving]

Actually, for the hell of it... Mad Kat, if I manage to get some of it in before Monday.. Would you be willing to make / be able to produce a render of some weapon effect concepts so I can have a visual of something? For example a PPC powering up to fire?

[mad kat]

Koniving, on 08 September 2019 - 01:45 PM, said:

Actually, for the hell of it... Mad Kat, if I manage to get some of it in before Monday.. Would you be willing to make / be able to produce a render of some weapon effect concepts so I can have a visual of something? For example a PPC powering up to fire?

Hi Koniving. I've used heffays 'how to create your own art from PGI's assets' thread. He's done a very handy converter to get the mechs with their armatures or rather control cubes for the limbs. But then you may already know that. :-p

The converter needs updating though so you can only use blender 2.79 to import the mechs, save as a blend file then open it in 2.8 (the new eevee render is awesome). It also means all the parenting fiddly stuff is already done.

I'd be glad to have a crack at doing some weapon effects a PPC would be cool. But i am only at amateur stage with blender with much to learn still. There is a lightning trick i want to try so that could be a help. If they're a still image some trickery with Gimp animations can often be easy. (The panthers glowing parts were all done in Gimp not rendered).

Either way let me know your ideas and I'll see what i can come up with. ������

Edited by mad kat, 08 September 2019 - 02:57 PM.

[Koniving]

mad kat, on 08 September 2019 - 02:57 PM, said:

Hi Koniving. I've used heffays 'how to create your own art from PGI's assets' thread. He's done a very handy converter to get the mechs with their armatures or rather control cubes for the limbs. But then you may already know that. :-p

The converter needs updating though so you can only use blender 2.79 to import the mechs, save as a blend file then open it in 2.8 (the new eevee render is awesome). It also means all the parenting fiddly stuff is already done.

I'd be glad to have a crack at doing some weapon effects a PPC would be cool. But i am only at amateur stage with blender with much to learn still. There is a lightning trick i want to try so that could be a help. If they're a still image some trickery with Gimp animations can often be easy. (The panthers glowing parts were all done in Gimp not rendered).

Either way let me know your ideas and I'll see what i can come up with. ������

It's because of that converter that I can't separate the parts for my own skeletons and why my preferred programs crash. When converting it to straight 3ds or lwo I get a single solid object and when I tell it to split into the subobjects, programs that I really like such as wings3d crash. His converter can work with straight blender but....I really don't want to learn it, I already have other animation programs I am very familiar with and can do key-frame based animation in very quickly where a new system would need lots of experimenting and learning. . Will have to see if mmd will accept control cubes... Prefer wings 3d for modeling as I had used it since the "nendo" 3d modeller and had made hundreds of fan mech/tank/starship renders back when dial up was the norm. Very comfy with it. Sounds like if I just suck it up and accept learning another program all the parts are already slapped onto skeletons/manipulatable. But then I will be without my intended pilots or will need to do some visual trickery to use two different renderers.

Far as the ideas, perhaps this can roll as a starter:
One of the few lore friendly things pgi did with PPCs in the original concept animation for mw5's Warhammer/atlas battle is that the PPCs charged up before firing. Some might say it's a mistake because PPCs charge with capacitors and those aren't 3015...but..hear me out.
PPCs have energy collection chambers (except the parti-kill), which means even before "capacitor" add-ons they had to charge up before firing. This was necessary regardless but for most PPCs they add an additional field inhibitor to slow it down, or else the heat may destroy the weapon under stress. As such turning that off effectively cuts the charge-to-fire time to about half a second shorter but the additional heat and risk is a price to pay for that urgency. With it on, however, you get a minimum range accuracy penalty as any mwo player might know trying to hit something close and fast with a charge up weapon is hard!
(Parti-kill's lore makes it different I'm both how the shot looks and that it has a very short firing delay. This is due to having a direct feed to the reactor rather than a connection to a regulating power chamber. It still has a field inhibitor but unique to the parti-kill there is no accuracy penalty. Instead damage is cut in half and the firing body section in which the PPC is mounted also received 5 damage.)

The reason that is important to note is on the Panther, that Lord's Light PPC is effectively the opposite. It is one of the slowest PPCs to fire. As one of the most compact models of standard PPC and gets its name by the brilliant, "almost holy" glow the PPC emits, starting at first like the light at the end of a tunnel and gradually increasing until energy emissions begin sparking small bolts of energy around the mid-chamber's ports prior to firing a blinding (to the naked eye) discharge. Although I have only seen it mentioned once, that looks ng firing delay has two advantages. The heat hits more gradually (occasionally but rarely pointed out in early novels), and that the gathering particles and heat emissions will distort incoming lasers thereby reducing damage. (Similar to anti-laser aerosols this just never gets mentioned again, but it strikes me as a pretty good trade considering how slow and tall the panther is.
The weapon also has 3 dedicated heatsinks mounted on it in fluff (worth noting for heat emissions effects), though placement in the description and actual placement highly disagree there.

This charge time is implied to be one of the longest of any given PPC, so I would like to see the Lord's Light in it's full 2 second charge time just to finally see what made it stand apart as both a psychological weapon and a glaring issue with trying to force it onto a light mech.

(Jackal comes much later with the help of rediscovered tech. The only other light mech to canonically get a full size PPC during the Clan invasion is the Thorn, where comstar replaces the right arm with a (it was either a parti-kill or a Krupp kinslaughter and in either case it too was an ER PPC and even then the Thorn suffered "unbalanced" as a result.))

If doing so would just be a color swap in gimp or blender for the effect, then I would not mind seeing some alternate colors with a quicker 1 second charge time. Otherwise the same animation in both 1 second and 2 second charging times followed by firing would be more than sufficiently amazing.

(Final edits/additions I promise Been up all night researching weapons and been discovering trends, such as Krupp's affinity for highly efficient energy weapons, Bulldog's unremarkable large laser that's cheap but horribly heat inefficient [Krypton-ion lasers in real life are terribly inefficient and produce a lot of waste heat, but while Krypton gas is in low supply on Earth it was very abundant and cheap for Bulldog Enterprises to use], the typical medium laser in battletech is actually red, with only the diverse optics 2 being green. Will compile it by next week for my mod threads.)

Edited by Koniving, 09 September 2019 - 01:23 AM.

[mad kat]

Koniving, on 09 September 2019 - 12:31 AM, said:

It's because of that converter that I can't separate the parts for my own skeletons and why my preferred programs crash. When converting it to straight 3ds or lwo I get a single solid object and when I tell it to split into the subobjects, programs that I really like such as wings3d crash. His converter can work with straight blender but....I really don't want to learn it, I already have other animation programs I am very familiar with and can do key-frame based animation in very quickly where a new system would need lots of experimenting and learning. . Will have to see if mmd will accept control cubes... Prefer wings 3d for modeling as I had used it since the "nendo" 3d modeller and had made hundreds of fan mech/tank/starship renders back when dial up was the norm. Very comfy with it. Sounds like if I just suck it up and accept learning another program all the parts are already slapped onto skeletons/manipulatable. But then I will be without my intended pilots or will need to do some visual trickery to use two different renderers.

Far as the ideas, perhaps this can roll as a starter:
One of the few lore friendly things pgi did with PPCs in the original concept animation for mw5's Warhammer/atlas battle is that the PPCs charged up before firing. Some might say it's a mistake because PPCs charge with capacitors and those aren't 3015...but..hear me out.
PPCs have energy collection chambers (except the parti-kill), which means even before "capacitor" add-ons they had to charge up before firing. This was necessary regardless but for most PPCs they add an additional field inhibitor to slow it down, or else the heat may destroy the weapon under stress. As such turning that off effectively cuts the charge-to-fire time to about half a second shorter but the additional heat and risk is a price to pay for that urgency. With it on, however, you get a minimum range accuracy penalty as any mwo player might know trying to hit something close and fast with a charge up weapon is hard!
(Parti-kill's lore makes it different I'm both how the shot looks and that it has a very short firing delay. This is due to having a direct feed to the reactor rather than a connection to a regulating power chamber. It still has a field inhibitor but unique to the parti-kill there is no accuracy penalty. Instead damage is cut in half and the firing body section in which the PPC is mounted also received 5 damage.)

The reason that is important to note is on the Panther, that Lord's Light PPC is effectively the opposite. It is one of the slowest PPCs to fire. As one of the most compact models of standard PPC and gets its name by the brilliant, "almost holy" glow the PPC emits, starting at first like the light at the end of a tunnel and gradually increasing until energy emissions begin sparking small bolts of energy around the mid-chamber's ports prior to firing a blinding (to the naked eye) discharge. Although I have only seen it mentioned once, that looks ng firing delay has two advantages. The heat hits more gradually (occasionally but rarely pointed out in early novels), and that the gathering particles and heat emissions will distort incoming lasers thereby reducing damage. (Similar to anti-laser aerosols this just never gets mentioned again, but it strikes me as a pretty good trade considering how slow and tall the panther is.
The weapon also has 3 dedicated heatsinks mounted on it in fluff (worth noting for heat emissions effects), though placement in the description and actual placement highly disagree there.

This charge time is implied to be one of the longest of any given PPC, so I would like to see a 2 second charge time.

Also would not mind seeing some alternate colors with a quicker 1 second charge time.

Hmm interesting i really had no idea of the detail of the lore. Geuss i should really get round to finding some of the novels to read.

I've got Wings 3d on my machine here (but never used it) so going to have a play to see if there's an easy mode for translating the models into it.

Heffays former method of renaming all parts to .Obj then using a Blender script to convert the individual parts into their correct locations without a parented armature in blender is i presume what your after. Which i have an old version of the panther done this way so i'll have a play see if there's an easy way.

*Edit* Yes if you use the old blender script and save as .Obj (uncheck selection) it does import each part of the model as a separate entity into Wings 3D.. Where you go from there, you'll know more than me.

Edited by mad kat, 09 September 2019 - 01:48 AM.

[Koniving]

Come to think of it, I was using a different program for exporting Crysis models. That loaded the entire body as a single piece, and the last time I tried exporting any models was the very last patch for open beta. Think from there I saw some pictures on Heffay's thing about it going into blender, appearing completely assembled and either got intimidated by the laundry list of thigns to do to get it done or just assumed it was going to be a dead in.

I still have that install for open beta as a full separate folder, with all sorts of glorious things like the commented out scripting for actuator damage (long gone from the actual game now), the original betty that was never released (samples here) the old heat system before the January 2013 rework, in which damage to equipment (including actuators, engine, gyro, everything except cockpit and life support) was taken at random once every second you were above 80% heat...and hitting 105% heat would instantly do 15 damage to the engine (killing you). (Most of which was commented out [disabled] in open beta but functional in closed beta).

So many sim-like ideas when PGI was passionate about it...and..
Shame the game couldn't be what it tried to be. Players kept complaining about control issues of veering off course (the 'penalty' of a damaged leg actuator) or arm weapons not aligning with others even when convergence was had (arm actuator damage)..The problem wasn't the systems, but the lack of information and documentation, people generally didn't know they existed and the monitors meant to tell us never got enabled. (There really was a reason for how there used to be half a dozen+, the original direction was much more of a sim...)

One of the cooler things is I've got the file for the original Catapult Torso, when it was done as originally proportioned by Alex to be under 10 meters tall. Although the physical size is not fitting of that, the scale of the cockpit and other proportions was, so that if the mech were shrunken to that size it'd be perfect. You can see the shadow of it here, the original windshield was much wider than what's depicted here.

Sadly, it doesn't contain the original legs, but you might notice they intended to put the Jenner at 11 meters tall...and someone decided to make the Catapult huge... the Catapult is actually an extremely short mech for its weight class which is why it has a lot of horizontal surface area, with two variations that aren't officially named but I call them the stilt-legged and the shunt-legged, basically its unclear if they're just different generations or art directions, but both are canonical as both are used in various stories. It was Metal Gear 5 that made me realize the real reason for the tall variation and when I went back to a novel where it was in use in 2015, I had my mind blown. (Long and short, unlike other Metal Gear walking tanks, the Sahelanthropus needed to walk upright because of the large amount of mountaineous terrain in Afghanistan, providing a necessary height vantage to be able to use its weaponry, where shorter designs are more ideal when it'd be in trouble of being exposed...one of the many reasons the Hunchback is always depicted as being much shorter than the Centurion is the Hunchback despite its superior armor isn't meant to be out in the open, where the Centurion is purpose built to escort Trebuchets.)

Continuing about Catapults...

Spoiler

Both versions the Catapult have also appeared in games, with the one appearing in Mechwarrior 1 and the other appearing in one of the Crescent Hawk's Revenge Battletech game..both in the 1980s so these designs are really close to each other and both had still been produced well into the 2000s. In general, the "shunt-legged" appears in most of the Mechwarrior games, perhaps because the long legs of the stilt-legged version just looks weird.
Shunt-legged

That's not a star trek bridge, that's front and side windows for a pilot.
Stilt-legged.

In fact both have frequently referenced heights ("with a clearance of 25 odd feet the Catapult barely had to lower itself by a couple. An easy task for the machine to do automatically without even so much as a thought for the pilot on good day" and I don't remember the rest of the quote but there was an issue with a leg actuator so it had to be done carefully, and then the pilot was killed in an ambush. 25 odd feet + a couple of feet is between 8-9 meters) and (10-11meters ["about six, maybe 6 and a half feet taller than what I was used to seeing in a Catapult." (approximately 2 meters)].

I'm not gonna get into it, but there's also two unique versions of most Hunchback 4-series.. The original, and a slightly taller more modern one made by Kali-Yama industries, they have a different skeleton and while the original is apparently better made with a whopping 180mm cannon, the 'remake' by Kali-Yama is large enough to fit things like XL engines, double heatsinks, etc...things the original could not...as long as you didn't mind having a 120mm AC/20 or lower end laser brands and armor that wasn't as good at deflecting autocannon fire. So yeah, neat stuff.

Some weapon lore can be found in the novels, for example
(From here I apparently had a lore-gasm about other weapons so read on if you're curious, sources often included).

Spoiler

the color of the Martell medium laser is red, its typically got a beam diameter of 6 to 8 cm [one is the model 5 on a Locust and the other is a non-specific Martell laser on a Shadowhawk), and that Martell lasers shoot more frequently than Defiance B3M lasers and yet while their hits don't seem to hit as hard, it's still enough of a threat that it could cause a Thunderbolt some grief. (Considering the sheer armor difference between a stock Thunderbolt and Shadowhawk. to be threatened by 1 medium laser is impressive). Weapon calibers are usually stated by centimeters rather than milimeters; just add a zero for the conversion. "12cm" or 120mm is the universal AC size for anything larger than an AC/2, though calibers vary quite a bit for example the Pontiac 100 on the Yen Lo Wang is actually the entire arm stolen from a Victor, and is 40mm with a multi-barrel configuration inside of a large armored shell that looks like a barrel, and 3 tons (at "5 rounds" a ton) which Allard jetisons (which are not completely full) contain "3,042" projectiles.

The ancient King Crab 000 sports 120mm autocannon 20s. The Atlas sports a 185mm autocannon 20.
The largest autocannon ever carried by a battlemech is on the Ebon Jaguar, depicted with two barrels, and fires at a rate of 2.5 seconds or 1.25 seconds for ultra-mode, and either way needs several seconds to cool once completing a cycle and usually braces itself before using it, which is why the Ebon Jaguar is depicted as 'low to the ground' or 'crouching' in its artwork. The cannon is unsafe to fire while moving and has never been mounted on any other mech.

In general, medium lasers are red, (Magna MK 2 is yellowish orange, Diverse Optics 2 is green, Diverse Optics 18, Defiance B3M, and several others are red), the typical small laser is actually green [in Mechwarrior 1 small was green, medium was yellow], and large lasers have a few different colors although purple is the color of the Defiance B3L large laser. In MW3 those red lasers in the opening cinematic are supposed to be ER mediums, but after MW2's popularity and chosen colors, they went back to the small red medium green large blue and it's stuck that way ever since for the MW series).

However, the more interesting details tend to lay hidden in the faction sourcebooks (specifically under corporations and under mech listings within them), in other sourcebooks such as Objective Raids, and in TROs (Parti-kill's details are under TRO 3026, as is the Cyclops Eye large laser). The Cyclops Large Laser [TRO 3026, Drillson] is a combination Large Laser and 1/4th PPC. It is unique in that unlike large lasers, it does not have a protective long barrel filled with focusing lenses and other gadgets but instead a slit for its laser emitter. Its unique trait, which according to a now defunct website on the waybackmachine, is that it was once given the official rules that the Cyclops Eye Laser is unaffected by Laser Reflective Armor, but it also does not reap the benefit other lasers would against another kind of armor (off the top of my head I can't remember which it was).

Krieger medium lasers, TRO 3026 under Puma (the tank, not the Clan Adder) isn't really remarkable in terms of given lore, but an interesting easter egg to me is that the Krieger medium lasers have long barrels each depicted to be half as long as the Donal PPC (which Donal is noted for being a very oversized PPC characterized by a blocky power chamber and oversized armored barrel, and typically is referred to as having a heftier punch [even HBS BT did that] and longer range and less often there's the ever rare mention of higher than typical heat issues). Anyway, the reason that ginormous barrels make the Krieger medium laser interesting, is like many of Battletech's companies, there's a real world counter part...by the same name. Krieger the real world company makes weapons, although a google search shows that apparently the real life company is known for making "exceptional barrels", whether for rifles or tanks..

So that was neat. Diverse Optics also has a real world counter part...called Diverse Optics..that specializes in laser technology. Note when it was founded...
http://www.diverseoptics.com/about-us/
Literally the same year the company was in Battletech with no clear indication which came first, although technically it is possible it was in BT first under Battle Droids, to be honest I haven't fully read the pre-1987 material too thoroughly as before William H. Keith Jr. there wasn't much there beyond the board game with some licensed artwork (macross, dougram, etc.)

Even Brinks makes an appearance as, well, you guessed it...
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Knox

An armored car company. (They don't make the vehicle, they just still exist in the 31st century providing security.)

In fact, did you know there are "Flak" Autocannon/5s? They're just AC/5s with a unique detail, but the Partison tank rocks them. Sturmfeur once had a rotary LRM-20 launcher that spun like a minigun as one of its many trial iterations but dropped it due to the missiles frequently colliding even in stream fire, eventually what they did was split them so that one LRM-launcher was in the body and launched vertically while the other was in the turret and launched horizontally, allowing it direct and indirect fire options where the tank-body launcher could completely ignore vertical obstacles and drop onto enemies from directly above.

Battletech is chock full of really neat detail and weird things too. Like there are dinosaurs that chew apart battlemechs and winged dragons sporting SRM-6 racks. But there's such an incredible weapon variety that PGI could have been selling us weapon variants for 6 years and we'd still not even cover all the core weapon classes.

[mad kat]

Koniving, on 09 September 2019 - 11:48 AM, said:

**snip**

I need a beer!

Just had the time to read through your very in depth summary of a lot of the weapon lore and i find it quite interesting!

I'll certainly add that in MWO the weapon calibres are a little excessive on many of the mechs the AC20 is a good 200mm. in fact many of the AC10's use the same barrel diameter but one thing you obviously wont get is shell length. It makes more sense from an armour piercing, range and accuracy perspective to have longer but lower calibre round but perhaps such small barrels on MWO's models would of looked odd.

What irks me most about the models is Ammo feeds though. I know it's a gameplay thing but storing ammo in legs is nothing short of ridiculous unless its anti personal weapons. Even then Ammo should be stored in the location in which the weapon sits. Some mech models could get away with this like the Dragon with the battleship hanging off the right shoulder, the Thanatos too also has sufficiently fat elbows to store an ammo bin. But by and large any ammo dependant mech should have only torso mounted weapons and 'adjacent' ammo bins. One of the reasons i like the roughneck is it actually has an ammo belt for the right shoulder AC. Noodly weedy elbow joints that are everywhere on the game models just don't look right in my eyes but obviously concessions have to be made for gameplay reasons. Another reasons i like mechs like the Rifleman, jaeger, blackjack etc that have no lower arm actuators.

Going back to the mech importer thing i did go back to Heffays thread and he has uploaded a new converter for blender 2.8. Although i had to dig for it by most recent date in his repository he links too.

Its then pretty simple to import the mech into blender with the armature,
>Select the armature on the scene collection (right click and select hierarchy)
>then open search (spacebar) and type in clear parent and select
>then clear and keep transformation and finally you can delete the armature then and everything stays in place.

You can also delete the other unneeded collections as you see fit. that i found was the most logical way to get the models into a state to export as individual components in the right location. You can always pose the models and un-pose them with clear transformation and clear rotation commands too.

I'm a Solidworks driver by day (and getting increasingly frustrated and annoyed by it) and i still think Blender is a great tool in comparison. Different kettle of fish of course but i will primarily use Blender (and occasionally Solidworks visualise if i need something fast) for our work needed renders and of course stompy things.

Edited by mad kat, 17 September 2019 - 01:53 AM.

[Koniving]

Sorry for the upteenth edit. I remembered that I started on AC artillery pieces but didn't follow up with the second piece.

One more quick edit which I'll include up here too. I wrote "40mm" for the Gauss Rifle. I used MM out of habbit. It is actually "40cm" as in 400mm.

mad kat, on 17 September 2019 - 01:39 AM, said:

I need a beer!

Just had the time to read through your very in depth summary of a lot of the weapon lore and i find it quite interesting!

Thank you and I'm glad you enjoyed it. Here's some more for the next time you find yourself with more time, as well as comments on some of the things you've noticed.

Spoiler

I could fill a novella with the details I've been finding in research for my MW5 Mercs mod to put in lore friendly weapons. (Edit I touch on that again later after finding Commando art on a page about fan-made TROs, I just might sometime).

But here's something quick and neat.AC/20s can be considered artillery pieces. I'm gonna share two here. There's the Chemjet Gun,which uses a liquid propellant to propel 185mm (the largest caliber of autocannon in the IS) up and over walls as well as fired directly. Quikcell is a company that makes the Hetzer, a vehicle described as being designed to fulfill the role of an artillery piece. "The Hetzer was designed as a cheap, self-propelled artillery-piece" from Sarna, which is almost word for word from the TRO 3026 as well. It sports the infamous 150mm "Crusher Super Heavy Cannon", the AC/20 that specifically fires in bursts of 10 shells to net its 20 damage. (That's 2 damage per shell). But... its got an AC/20...and it is...artillery? Sure enough it is, and it is able to use its AC/20 as indirect fire in more than one short story. But how is 270 meters an artillery range?

Welp 270 meters is the "most accurate" range given that AC/20s typically are just souped-up Ultra-Ultra/5s without the jam risks and super heavy. The actual range of autocannons is about 2,000 meters in Battletech [just under 67 hexes, which is 7 hexes beyond BT's imposed visual range]. The Crusher SHC AC/20 deliberately fires a 10 shell burst to take advantage of how the recoil would rock the truck around (and yes, it literally is a truck with a single slab of an armored shell slapped on with manways and turret space cut out of it). The rocking of the truck causes a dispersal spread of the Hetzer's burst which then covers a wide surface area, making it an area-of-effect artillery piece out to quite a bit of distance, but to effectively use its firepower against a mech it still has to be close to 270 meters to have a chance in heck of hitting the target with every shell from a burst.

Some fun but unnecessary shell info about how they relate to one another. I tacked in the truth about LBX along with it.

Spoiler

(The universal shells of AC/5, 10 and 20 are 100 and 120mm, universal for AC/5 and 10 is 80 to 120mm, where AC/5s go as low as 40mm, AC/20s go as low as 40mm [specifically, Victor and Yen Lo Wang; Pontiac 100 a 100 shot to net 20 damage autocannon which is delivered in less than 3 seconds). (real life 40mm autocannon for reference. Obviously this shoots much slower. It is noteworthy that under the big armored shell of the Victor's "barrel" is actually a rotary arrangement of "multiple barrels in a protective shell" [the 'outer barrel']. Its also worth noting that the Victor has jamming issues, requires multiple seconds of locking the arm into a specific position to reload,and features a secondary ammo feed in case if the first one jams in which the mech must manually take cartridges from a port on the right torso and insert into the upper-port of the Pontiac 100. Yen Lo Wang, however, could not use this secondary method due to not having a way to eject cartridges from the chest into the hand, also something about the hand made it a pointless consideration.)

If you're wondering where the AC/2 fits, in novels I've seen 20mm (LBX-2, LAC-2) or 30mm (AC/2, UAC/2) up to 80mm. It is canonically written that AC/2 goes from 30mm to 90mm. I've never actually seen a 90mm AC/2 ever actually mentioned on a mech or in a novel, however. If I were to make an assumption of how much damage a 90mm AC/2 can do, I'd say 1 damage. As 120mm is specifically mentioned by the GM Whirlwind/5 of the Marauder to need 3 shots to do 5 damage, at "a painfully slow firing rate of 3-4 shells a second." For comparison, the GM Whirlwind/L AC/2s of a Blackjack at 30mm need 10 shells to make 2 damage...and 20mm LBX are depicted as rotary barrel arrangements, not shotguns.

(LBX in general is actually originally described in TRO 2750 as firing a flak-like shell that comes with its own special targeting computer that allows it to get superior range over autocannons. The "Shotgun" misconception somehow stuck as it was an easy way to explain. "Think a Mech shotgun" is much easier to convey the idea of damage gets spread rather than "it's a series of projectiles that after a certain time-delay or proximity setting will detonate, unleashing small explosive sub-munitions that collectively could rival missiles in raw damage.")

Quote

I'll certainly add that in MWO the weapon calibres are a little excessive on many of the mechs the AC20 is a good 200mm. in fact many of the AC10's use the same barrel diameter but one thing you obviously wont get is shell length. It makes more sense from an armour piercing, range and accuracy perspective to have longer but lower calibre round but perhaps such small barrels on MWO's models would of looked odd.

MWO's autocannons are using shells thicker, longer, and higher caliber than...anything else in the game. In general, I think if they used the lore's mentioned calibers to gauge barrel sizes, they might have conjured some better mech scales, although some mechs are oversized or undersized in the lore for reasons that cannot make sense in a highly customizable environment..

Spoiler

Endo-steel-totting mechs and mech variants are (mostly) larger than those that don't have it are the most guilty of this.. For example the transition from 2D and 5M for Shadowhawk changed it from a 9.63 meter tall (or as Karl Strieger has once put it at 9.55 meters tall), to something 2 meters taller and girthier. The reason? A new endo-steel skeleton, cramming in an XL engine, double heatsinks, etc. The SHK-5M is a "complete overhaul."

All ACs in MWO also use the same shell. For completely inexplicable reasons other than it was quick and dirty and no one fixed it. Much like the cool effect from a Gauss Rifle firing is just Cry-engine's default "shatter glass" effect significantly enlarged.

The "sabot" tank shell on the man is touching, strangely... is MWO's Gauss projectile.

The green one to your right; the technician's left that looks like a missile is MWO's Autocannon. Yes, that's the actual size of the shell used in MWO. Which is much bigger than the 3 barrels of the UAC/5 on a Blackjack (compare it!) Yet UAC/5s are using this too in MWO.

Some Autocannon nerdiness.

Spoiler

Meanwhile, autocannons shells for a 120mm autocannon were described as an oversized bullet shell with a flat surface over the shell meant to prevent dirt and dust from getting inside, rather than conventional tank shells of old, and as being 15 to 20 lbs and able to be carried in one hand, though usually held in two.
Real life 120mm tank shell (SABOT)

50-ish lbs.

However, that's a tank shell, and the only Battletech weapons firing tank shells are "Rifles", and I believe it's a Light Rifle sporting 120mm shells. They do 3 - 3 damage against battlemech armor. Medium Rifles (6-3 damage) were 8 tons and fired something akin to 155mm shells and the only detailed Heavy Rifle in Battletech novels on the Artbiter fires 190mm, which deals 9-3 damage. (Also worth noting is that more akin to missiles, the ammo tracker for Mech Rifles is meant to be approximately 1 shot per tick, so 18 shells for a Light Rifle much more closely means "18 shots" where an GM Whirlwind/L for a Blackjack is 10 shells per tick (meaning the Blackjack's 1 ton of ammunition contains 450 projectiles, so each Light Rifle shell is 111 lbs approximately if we ignore that a ton also contains the ammo bin, so probably more like 200 lbs for the bin and 100 lbs per Light Rifle shell, to literally do no damage to a mech.. More on the difference as to why ACs work).

(comically, a damage breakdown assuming all AC ammo is universal for each caliber, puts 180mm at 4 damage shell, 185mm at 5 damage/shell, and 203mm at 10 damage/shell. (in order to produce more risk/reward I've tweaked these so that the lowest calibers can provide a damage edge to reward the face-time necessary and lowered the damage output of the highest calibers to have up-front damage be the reward at the cost of damage over time). Mind you AC ammo is "HEAP" or high explosive armor piercing, and supposedly the shells 'stick' into the armor as they rarely ever actually pierce unless insanely close (and then comes the minimum range accuracy issues of an opponent with automated dodging capabilities as all mechs have while using a joystick to aim). After sticking, they explode within a half a second. The delay is to ensure maximum potential penetration and to try and push its explosive materials into the armor before detonating.)

I find that neat since battlemech armor is "exceptional" at preventing piercing damage, and yet can receive upwards of 10 damage from a punch, so not nearly as effective against wide-surface kinetic attacks. A spray of autocannon fire effectively does exactly that, as does a slew of missiles with their explosions. The Gauss Rifle Poland Main Model A, the universal Gauss Rifle', fires a 40cm (that's 400mm!!!) "watermelon" shaped shell. Strangely it doesn't go for piercing, it goes for mass blunt impact...to do devastating damage that no other weapon aside from Gauss or Clan ER PPC can manage in a single shot (literally no autocannon in BT is a single shot=100% damage weapon).

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What irks me most about the models is Ammo feeds though. I know it's a gameplay thing but storing ammo in legs is nothing short of ridiculous unless its anti personal weapons. Even then Ammo should be stored in the location in which the weapon sits. Some mech models could get away with this like the Dragon with the battleship hanging off the right shoulder, the Thanatos too also has sufficiently fat elbows to store an ammo bin. But by and large any ammo dependant mech should have only torso mounted weapons and 'adjacent' ammo bins. One of the reasons i like the roughneck is it actually has an ammo belt for the right shoulder AC. Noodly weedy elbow joints that are everywhere on the game models just don't look right in my eyes but obviously concessions have to be made for gameplay reasons. Another reasons i like mechs like the Rifleman, jaeger, blackjack etc that have no lower arm actuators.

Canonically, nothing aside from small lasers or machine guns (of the MWO-available weapons we can use) ever had a presence in the legs of Battletech's mechs. No ammo, no bigger guns, etc. Even then I'm not even certain that ammo was stored in the legs but instead the CT, as the CT is usually the lowest point any ammo ever really goes. The legs were almost exclusively for one of several things: field repair equipment [non-standard but handy for campaigns], anti-personnel pods (a Clan thing), Catapillar tracks (Robot Jox, literally, Battletech has robot jox conversions for mechs)

Typically if you check out stock designs, ammunition is stored in the torso closest to the weapon, though a single ton of ammunition may be stored on the arm that a weapon is in (indicating it is directly attached), or if a single ton is supplying multiple weapons the ammunition will be located in the center torso.

In the case of the Blackjack this is true, and you will note that you can track the belts of ammunition throughout the body as it goes to the arms.
(Hideous as this thing is, I have to applaud them for making certain that the ammo track is depicted.)

Don't see it? "Holla-hoop." It supposedly circles around the body and unites with the bulging shoulders before feeding into the guns; that whole set of bulges isn't just aesthetics, its supposed to be an armored "track" for the ammo to travel.
That also means "Shoot here, there's ammo under all this extra armor."

On the Hunchback, note that the ammo is on the left torso. Note the drum...on the back of the left torso. This feeds along the back into the autocannon in the right torso. But on the only canonical image of the 4SP, the drum is on the center torso.

But we'll find that the ammo for the twin launchers is in the CT, as such the drum being moved makes sense. Shame PGI didn't think of this...but then again we can put ammo anywhere,and the entire point of the drum was the Hunchback with the Komiyaba type VIII chassis was such a compact mech that it couldn't fit the ammo inside itself (it's the same height as a Commando up to barely taller than one in numerous depictions, and much shorter than the Centurion in side by side comparisons).

(Atlas is another mech that's described as chock full; so much that Atlas is never depicted with full 20 racks despite most designs having LRM-20. In fact until the K, every Atlas had a 5 missile rack on the hip, which pumped out 20 missiles in 7.5 seconds., it was a glorified LRM-5 pumping out 5 missiles every 2.5 seconds with the remaining 2.5 seconds used to swap the 5 clips [as each tube has its own clip per TRO 3025])

I fully agree however, that many of the designs just fail to account for such things. Others do in strange ways, there's a really scrawny looking mech whose name I can't recall, but it has a CT belly-positioned missile launcher (despite it being mounted in one side torso) and a side torso (opposite of the first) missile launcher...and like no room for stuff. It also has strange wing-like appendage on the back, which if you really rotate the image looks like an oversized AK-47 magazine and is attached to the center torso where the ammo is. This giant 'clip' is where the ammo is supposed to be located to feed into the mech.

In large part, the art suffered immensely after Harmony Gold and the company (Playmates) that did Exosquad.

FASA wanted Playmates to run a cartoon and toy series on Battletech, but FASA was turned down... Then the above happened.
Between both situations, FASA's Battletech art for TROs and mechanical things suffered immensely. Still was pretty high end for characters but clearly these people couldn't design machines. One image of the Commando looking at us...shows us that the artist doesn't know how knees work, or center of gravity. (The leg design is very clearly backwards, but rolled with despite how this thing would have to lurch forward in order to stand under its own weight like some kind of yeti.

Also: Literal butt-missile.
Personally, I do kinda like this image as it is the first to truly clarify the head shape of the original Commando, as it is by the same artist as the original with its head turned left, and the first one done correcting it. Even so, another version is out there and looks like official artwork (I don't have it on me) in which the helmet is slanted and you get this weird looking left-eye look...where the artist clearly didn't get the memo.

(In looking for that, I found this one in which the artist drew a Commando with inspiration from the 1980s gundam series. I really like the aesthetic, and I've decided that this is what I will use for the Commando 1-C's Autocannon. I'm not even sure if it was intended to be one, but it works so well when compared to some other exceptional art in consideration for what sounds like an upcoming fan-made TRO.

I'm considering something similar, actually, which I may do as a compilation of the weapons I put into MW5 Mercs.

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Going back to the mech importer thing i did go back to Heffays thread and he has uploaded a new converter for blender 2.8. Although i had to dig for it by most recent date in his repository he links too.

Its then pretty simple to import the mech into blender with the armature,
>Select the armature on the scene collection (right click and select hierarchy)
>then open search (spacebar) and type in clear parent and select
>then clear and keep transformation and finally you can delete the armature then and everything stays in place.

You can also delete the other unneeded collections as you see fit. that i found was the most logical way to get the models into a state to export as individual components in the right location. You can always pose the models and un-pose them with clear transformation and clear rotation commands too.

I'm a Solidworks driver by day (and getting increasingly frustrated and annoyed by it) and i still think Blender is a great tool in comparison. Different kettle of fish of course but i will primarily use Blender (and occasionally Solidworks visualise if i need something fast) for our work needed renders and of course stompy things.

Sounds like I'm gonna have to give Blender a genuine try, then. After learning 3DS Max and Cinema 4D only to never actually use them again, I've been absolutely hesitant to try Blender and the one time I did I had issues with accidentally moving the menu and controls around when just trying to select and try tools and I think after a few minutes I just gave up.

Edited by Koniving, 21 September 2019 - 11:12 AM.