block based robot - work in progress.

[Rebecca]

I've had a look at the zmodel source and found a comment which makes me hope that *maybe* it is possible to get weights to work, see here: http://alientrap.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=37267

[zuriastrad]

that would be great if it works out. obviously the weight painting on this model is a basic as it comes, but i'm hoping to do something more subtle in future.

[zuriastrad]

well, i'm making good progress. i've got my model to appear in the game, even if it's only animation is standing still. i've scaled it somewhere near to the correct size and shifted the vertical position till it is touching the ground. it just glides around completely motionless, but it's a step in the right direction.

next i concentrated on getting the skin working. i made a skin called blockbot.tga and put it in a folder called textures in my pk3. i edited blockbot.smd (the mesh) to replace all the lines which said skin with blockbot.tga. the model now has a shiny red skin in the game. thanks again to ihsan for his pyria template, it's a massive help.

here's the download page for my first pk3

[ihsan]

I'm so glad that people are using the template. Feel free to update and fix it. (GPL baby)

[zuriastrad]

for the linux users, here's how i replaced skin with blockbot.tga in my blockbot.smd model file.

sed -i 's/skin/blockbot.tga/g' blockbot.smd

[zuriastrad]

more progress. i've added the "bip01 r hand" bone to my model. this is the one that the weapon attaches to. i parented it to the right hand bone of my skeleton. the gun was upside down to start with, so i had to rotate the bone 180 degrees around it's axis in pose mode to fix that. works ok now.

i was having to scale the model down to 0.021% in config-zym.txt, which seemed a bit messy. so i scaled both the skeleton and mesh down by that amount in blender and set the scale in config-zym.txt to 1. doesn't really make any difference, but it's tidier.

latest pk3

[zuriastrad]

ok, i'm trying out some basic animations now. i've got an idle.smd which is one frame of animation standing still and i have a crude run.smd where the legs just waggle back and forth. the problem is that whichever animation comes first in config-zym.txt just runs all the time, regardless of whether i am standing still or running. if i have...

Code: Select all

output "blockbot"
scale 1
origin 0 0 23
rotate 90
mesh mesh.smd
scene idle.smd fps 10
scene run.smd fps 22

...then my model glides around the map motionless, but if i have...

Code: Select all

output "blockbot"
scale 1
origin 0 0 23
rotate 90
mesh mesh.smd
scene run.smd fps 22
scene idle.smd fps 10

...it runs all the time, even when i'm not moving.

is this because i don't have the complete set of animations?

[zuriastrad]

yep. looks like it was because there wasn't a full set of animations. i copied the idle animation to all of the other animations except run.smd, which i have a basic one for already. i built them all into the zym and everything seems to work, if i stand still the model is idle and if i move forward it switches to the run cycle.

[zuriastrad]

been busy again. i got annoyed with having dead robot's still standing so i made a death animation and used it for both die1 and die2.

also, i've been working on how to get coloured skins in ctf. i'd assumed that there were just coloured skins, like in quake3, but i was pleased to find nexuiz's system where the _pants and _shirt skins are coloured by preferences or turned to team colours in a ctf game. since i wanted the entire robot to change colour i put all of the texuring into blockbot_shirt.tga and replaced blockbot.tga with a 16x16 black square. this means that all the texturing on the bot is colour changable.

the only weird bit that i noticed was that even though i used a _shirt texture i had to change the pants colour in the setting to get any effect. i'll try making a _pants texture aswell and seeing if that helps. pretty odd bug really.

latest bot pk3

[The mysterious Mr. 4m]

I'm starting to really like this model. Feel free to upload it to Ouns.