Weapon animating: help needed (making crossbow)

[take_this_cup_of_poison]

I'm making a crossbow. It sucessfully is improted into nex (player model, ground model, HUD, the hud is textured too ( the pmodel and ground model have a texture bug where they want to display textures/Material.tga (or png, or whatever ) as their texture... due to buggy exporter...)

Anyway in attempting to animate the firing sequence of the crossbow in the HUD I made 2 blend files and converted them both to smd files. One file is crossbow_cocked.smd and the other is crossbow_fired.smd.

I copy crossbow_fired.smd to fire.smd and fire2.smd
I copy crossbow_cocked.smd to the rest of the smd and run zmodel config.txt (yes it's a linux binary, I compiled zmodel from source).

~/.blender/scripts/nexwe$ ls
config.txt fire.smd idle.smd ref.smd source winexes zymexport.bat
fire2.smd gmon.out modtool.exe run.smd temp.smd zmodel.exe

The problem is when I'm firing, it never shows an animation, the crossbow is always cocked.

I have done wrong.
Show me the path.

[ihsan]

if you don't mind posting the smd's and stating which blender import script u used (looks like the one i put together) then i maybe can be more help.

[take_this_cup_of_poison]

I have nowhere to put them and I don't think that would help. I need to know the proper procedure for animating nexuiz weapons using blender. I am using that nexuiz weapon exporter script bundle that was mentioned in the forum. Once the crossbow is done it will be under the GPL (well it allready is actually just not released yet as it doesn't work).

[ihsan]

A few quick things:
1. The material name is used as the filename for the texture. Rename your material to crossbow.tga or something like that.
2. EVERYTHING in that exporter is hard coded. It was not designed to create custom animations. It's just a couple exporters i sewed together to get models in easily. The whole mesh is weighted to 'bone01' at the origin.

[take_this_cup_of_poison]

How do I rename a material?

Also how do I animate the crossbow in blender, this is what I really need to know.
What are the steps. I tried making 2 smds, one with the bowstring cocked, one with it forward. The 2nd never showed when firing even though it was copied to fire.smd and fire2.smd.

Does anyone else know anything about animating weapons in blender?

[take_this_cup_of_poison]

I renamed the material. I animated in blender now and the effect is: still no animation but when I export and bring the weapon in game, though the hud weapon is fine, the ground and player weapon is TINY!

Can anyone help me with this? I am using blender. Please help.
Don't people make weapons for this game?

I used this tutorial:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D ... _Animation

[take_this_cup_of_poison]

Here is the crossbow, including the SMDs, blenderfiles, texture, etc.
http://md3.bpa.nu:81/other/crossbowstart.pk3

I made it replace the crylink (I like the crylink btw).
Need help animating and after that I will have to code new ammo type etc (bolt).

Please help me.

[ihsan]

Without changing the Nexuiz quake C you can't have different meshes for cocked and fired. Since this weapon needs moving parts the weapon exporter script just won't do it. When i get the time i'll rig your crossbow and set up the animations.

For the record, nobody other than the two of us (afaik) are trying to make weapons for nexuiz. I learned python and put that weapon exporter together (by combining and patching other scripts) simply because it became clear that nobody else would do it.
f0rqu3 is still working on a ZYM imoprter/exporter which should make all this a lot easier.

[Rad Ished]

Doc pyton made a lot of nice weapon meshes, have a look in his thread. Or do you mean completely new weapons?

[ihsan]

OMG how could I forget Doc Python!!! tZork never revived his cool tMod, which added 2 weapons to nex 1.5, and Team Nexuiz is a team no more
So that's 3 of us making weapons for nexuiz.