Tutorials - Rigging creatures with TPDC

You cannot simply import dinosaur models into a level and have it walk around instantly. As you probably already know all dinosaurs in Trespasser have an underlying bone system. In-game, you can make this visibible with the "bones cheat". These bones drive the visible skin of the creature much like bones and muscles change the shape of a real world creature. Except, there are no muscles pushing and pulling on the bones, but rather pre-programmed 'motors' that are controlled by the AI (artificial intelligence) of the dinosaurs (something which is called forward kinematics) and physical interaction (through the ridgid body physics simulation, called inverse kinematics, but you may call this "ragdoll physics").

More about the interactivity/physics part in a later tutorial, lets first get our dinosaur skin rigged.

Step 1
	Click "File" > "New" to run the wizard. Now click the Browse button, browse to your exported TPM file, select it and click "Open". Select the preset we want to use as template. We've used the original "RaptorB" skin as reference in the previous tutorials, so we'll use the same preset now as well. Click "OK". The files will be loaded.
Step 2
	You'll be asked to select the skin model, click "OK". A new window with a list of model names will be loaded. Select the name of your exported skin model, and click "OK".
Step 3
	The skin will now apear in the viewport and you can begin assigning weights. But remember to save the scene under a new filename first. At this point the skin has a green glow over it, that's because none of the vertices are assigned to a bone.
Step 4
	Now select a bone in the bone list, lets start with numbered "00". A bone, or actually joint, will be highlighted in orange in the viewport, this is the currently selected bone. Now click or drag over a few vertices in the viewport, they will become red, that means it is assigned to the currently selected bone. Now select a different bone in the bones list. The vertices you just selected will become white, that means they are assigned to a bone, but not the selected one. Got the idea? Select bone "00" again and assign all vertices to selected joint that are between the currently selected joint and the next joint.
Step 5
	Now repeat what you've done in the previous step until you have all vertices in the tail assigned to the tail joints. Remember, only vertices that are on or come after the selected joint should be assigned or you will notice warping problems with your creature in-game.
Step 6
	Now rotate the view around. Oops, we didn't assign the vertices on the other side. That's because vertex-culling is enabled. This means that all vertices that are not visible cannot be selected, which is actually very usefull on other areas of a skin, especially in tight areas. However, you can disable this option either by switching to wireframe mode or by unchecking the option in the "View" menu when you don't need it. Now fix it and assign those remaining vertices.
Step 7
	Continue repeating the previous steps until all vertices are assigned to the appropriate joint. As with bipedal dinosaurs you won't have to assign the vertices in the arms to the arm joints because the arms are not animated anyway. You can assign them but that may cause a slight bit of warping. Assign the vertices to the last joint before the first neck joint for the best results.

Notes
I will later expand this tutorial and explain how the save/load weight tools work. Future versions of TPDC will support additional features that will make rigging easier to understand. Due to lack of time I will refrain from writing instructions covering functionalities that eventually will be replaced or removed.