newbones - an experimental skeleton

[zuriastrad]

[-z-] - thanks for the encouragement. a complete a-z for character making does sound like a good idea. i'll have to give that some thought.

[zuriastrad]

ok, now i've got my skeleton sorted it's time to start posing it. as you can see in this pic...



... i've twisted the body a little and put the arms in a gun holding pose. it's important to note that the skeleton is still in it's neutral position, this is just a pose. it still needs a little tweaking, but you can see the general idea.

click here to download newbones-0002.pk3

IMPORTANT - if you downloaded newbones.pk3 from the first post you must delete that for this new file to work. (bad naming on my part)

[zuriastrad]

few more tweaks on the basic gun holding pose. any improvement?

click here to download newbones-0003.pk3

[SavageX]

Oh, that's interesting work.

I thought Blender and SMD were basically incompatible?

[zuriastrad]

savagex-
the blender/smd situation is pretty terrible. i can't import smd files and the export script is kinda messed up when it comes to exporting animation file, requiring a lot of text editing to get them to work. i'm hoping this will get fixed at some point.

[[-z-]]

savagex-
the blender/smd situation is pretty terrible. i can't import smd files and the export script is kinda messed up when it comes to exporting animation file, requiring a lot of text editing to get them to work. i'm hoping this will get fixed at some point.

Do you know if this is directly related to the quality of the python script or caused by limitations python has to the actual conversion. That is, can a python guru go in and clean this up or are we destine to use a ghetto rigged converter?

[zuriastrad]

well, the nexuiz smd export script has three options. mesh export, exporting an animation sequence and exporting all animations.

the first and third work ok, but the second option seems to export all animations just like the third, when i assume it should only be exporting the animations defined in the sta (start) and end boxes in the "anim" tab of render options.

so i'm guessing the script is designed to export specific sequences but is not functioning right now due to changes in blender. hopefully a python guru would be able to fix it without too much difficulty and it would be a great script to work with. if the smd import script could get fixed too there would be a complete set of tools for blender users.

[zuriastrad]

i've been doing some thinking about scaling. i'd like my skeleton to be easily scalable. this isn't an issue for nexuiz since the zym (and possibly dpm?) building process lets you set a scaling modifier, but i'd like my skeleton to be usable in other games that might not have that flexibility.

there are two ways of moving bones that i might consider using, rotation and location. rotation scales without any problems, but location doesn't. for example, if i had a run cycle i could make the body bounce up and down by altering the location of the bone at the base of the spine. but if i then scaled the model up to x10 the location values wouldn't scale with it and the run cycle would become very flat. if i scaled it down to 1/10th the location values wouldn't scale down and the body would bounce wildly up and down.

with this in mind i'm going to stick to only using rotation. this means i can't use location to make the body move up and down relative to the origin bone (the one between the feet), so i've put a couple more bones in there so that the same effect can be acheived by rotation alone.


also, i've scaled the mesh and the armature down to a single blender unit. i figured that it's easier to figure out how much to scale an object by if you are starting with a value of 1 instead of 1.8.

[zuriastrad]

ok, i've been tinkering with the bones some more and now i've got this happening...



what i did was start from my one unit model and then scale it up by 1.8 to make it the correct size in nexuiz, but it seems to have scaled the weapon models too. i'm guessing scaling up the bone "bip01 r hand" has made nexuiz also scale up the weapon that is attached to it. pretty weird behaviour.

[HarryButt]

I want that gun
Nah, srsly. I think, your work is gonna be extremely useful for contributing new player models, so please don't give up on this.