newbones - an experimental skeleton

[zuriastrad]

this isn't a major problem. it just looks like i need to scale the mesh and armature to the correct size in blender instead of trying to do it in the zym stage. the scale factor in the zym stage is probably useful for fine tuning, but not for large adjustments.

it is tempting to make a character model with giant weapons though.

[KillaGrunt]

Nice

[zuriastrad]

this was an accidental discovery, but it could actually be really useful. now i have the ability to adjust the size of weapons my characters use. i did have an idea for a character with a shoulder mounted weapon (to free up the arms for animating), but the weapons looked too big. now i could scale the weapons down to miniature version that would sit nicely on the shoulder. might try that out at some point.

[zuriastrad]

no major progress, but a few tweaks. i resized the mesh and armature to 1.8 blender units and set the scale in the zym export process to 1, so there shouldn't be any more problems with over-sized weapons.

also, i've altered the positioning of the arms. since the arms are going to spend most of the time bent (holding the gun) then it makes sense to have them bent on the armature and mesh too, so that the modeler can model the elbow correctly. the default pose now has the arms bent and facing straight forwards. i spent a bit of time rotating the "bip01 r hand" bone (the one the gun is mounted on) so that the gun is held level. i cut the hands off because they contained an edge shared by 4 faces and it was causing the export script to fail. there are now some crude blocks instead of hands, but i'm not bothered by that.

i'm spending a lot of time fiddling around with this, but i think it's worth it. i want to make sure i've got the basics right before i start trying to make any animations.

click here to download newbones-0004.pk3
click here to download newbones-00008.blend

[ihsan]

[quote="zuriastrad"

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. [/quote]

Question 1: Did you apply the changes pointed out in http://alientrap.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3057

Question 2: Is there anything which can be done to make the script more usable?
(I only learned enough python to modify dragonlord's SMD scripts so they are nexuiz compatible so I know they need work.)

[Psychcf]

Question 2: Is there anything which can be done to make the script more usable?
(I only learned enough python to modify dragonlord's SMD scripts so they are nexuiz compatible so I know they need work.)

It would be nice if I could select double-folded edges in a separate script. It drives me nuts when I try to export some models that I found.

[zuriastrad]

ihsan-
yes, i included rebecca's modification, the bones didn't work without it. as for improvements, you know i said about how it looks like the nexuiz smd export script needs the values to be set in sta and end in the anim tab to know which bits to export?

well, that's a workable idea, but a bit slow and fiddly if you have a load of animations to export. this md5 export script has some nice tools to improve the situation, it still takes the settings from the anim tab as it's starting point, but puts the values in a box, so you can alter them by hand if you are exporting a load of different animations.

also, it the script doesn't end as soon as you export, you can export a load of stuff and it stays open till you hit quit. that would be a great feature to have in the nexuiz export script too.

[zuriastrad]

another plus would be that when this error message appeared...

...the script would highlight the offending edges, so that when you go into edit mode the problem would be immediately apparent. this could save hours of work. this is probably a lot to ask, but it would be amazing to have.

[Psychcf]

another plus would be that when this error message appeared...

...the script would highlight the offending edges, so that when you go into edit mode the problem would be immediately apparent. this could save hours of work. this is probably a lot to ask, but it would be amazing to have.

It would be nice if I could select double-folded edges in a separate script. It drives me nuts when I try to export some models that I found.

Ok, that's two requests.

[zuriastrad]

Psychcf-
glad to hear i'm not the only one suffering with that problem.