sitting animation

i tried to create a player animation for a mod, i need have the upper part of the body do what it's normally doing and the lower part sitting on a chair in a vehicle. (the vehicle part is beeing taken care of by our coder)

but i can't get the legs just sitting without moving.

i only know some of the principles of character animation, so I can't give much more than an opinion, but it sounds like what you want shouldn't be the hardest thing to do.

The top part of the model has all of it's animations made seperately from the bottom half, and the top/bottom animations get blended together by lines in the .qc file. This cuts down on the total amount of animations that need to be made. For example, walk, crouch, run, stand etc are all bottom half animations, and they all use the same shoot, stab, scratch buttocks, etc. (top half animations) There would be too many individual animations if 'walk' needed to have seperate versions for each of the top half actions. Then a whole new set for 'run' etc.

I imagine that you already know most, if not all of that.

So, what I guess I would do first, would be to decompile a player model, open the reference model in good old milkshape, and create a static pose with the legs in a sitting position. If I had a model of the vehicle that this was intended for use in, then I'd use that as a guide for the pose. When I was happy with the pose, I'd delete the vehicle, and export the .smd, and name it as one of the existing 'bottom half' animations, like walk.smd.

As long as the decompiler has created an accurate .qc file that can be compiled again, then the new 'walk' animation should have the legs in a static sitting position, but still be capable of all the original top half actions. In theory, anyway.

IF, it worked, then I'd go back and make an animated sitting pose, a 30 second loop with some twitching etc.

This would leave the problem of the player model having a broken-arsed walk, but that would be a different bridge to cross.

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i eat paint

you say 'i only know some of the principles of character animation', whell, you know a lot more then me, this i kind of my first animation job, but becouse the mod really needs the animations i tried to do it.

so from the versions i've heard i get really confused.

you say that top and bottom are seperate animations, ok that was my first idea to. but then i found the source smd's in the sdk, some files are named walk_smg1_aim (or something like that) so that looks like bottom AND top part in 1 animation?

my coder says that i have to edit the guestures for aiming, and make a sitting version of them, but thats kind of hard becouse the pelvis moves and then the legs and top parts of the body move. so if i remove the movement of the pelvis, the top aiming animations are not correct anymore, and if i don't remove the rotation keyframes of the pelvis the legs won't stay on place in the different frames, so what do i have to do?

I looked at the sdk files last night, and tried to work out how the character animations, qc files, qci files etc, all come together to make a player model. It's too much to take in all at once, but I learned a little, and I still think my initial plan, with a few ammendments, would be the way to go.
One of the qc(qci?) files that gets included in compiling models has all of the crouch animations referenced in it. All of these animation.smd's have only one frame each, a simple crouching pose. There are no shooting or other actions in them, so they look like the perfect candidates for adaptation.

so if i remove the movement of the pelvis, the top aiming animations are not correct anymore

Have you tried this already? If so, what goes wrong with aiming?

I'm thinking that any problems with rotation should be taken care of by the coder.

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i eat paint