i've been tinkering with the nexuiz player models and i've noticed that the skeletons' default poses are hunched over holding the gun. this makes sense for the animator because that's where most of the animations will start from, but it does make it difficult to recycle the skeleton to re-use in new character models. the model would have to be twisted and manouvered to match the skeleton. it occurs to me that if there was a skeleton that started from a symetrical, neutral pose then it would be a lot easier to use with new models. it would create more work for the animator, but would incredibly easy to recycle, which would be a useful asset for an open source project.

with this in mind i've started experimenting. i imported the insurrectionist's zym, deleted the armature (skeleton) and spent a while transorming the mesh into a symetrical model stood in a fairly neutral pose with the arms slightly out from the side of the body. then i built a new skeleton from scratch, taking care to keep it symetrical. i did some basic weight painting, but nothing too detailed since i'm only using the insurrectionist model temporarily. i've made this work as a zym model which you can download below. it's not much use as a character model since it doesn't have any animations yet, but it does demonstrate the starting pose quite nicely.

click here to download newbones-0001.pk3
click here to download the blend file

is the nex so huge or is he so small....?

i'm guessing i made him a little on the small side. might have to fix that.

yeah the model is a bit to small and if you try with chase_active 1 you can see that the weapons are on the shoulder lol

ah, i must have posted the wrong pk3. i had an earlier one where the weapon was shoulder mounted. i'll have to fix that too.

ok. i've replaced the pk3 with one that actually holds the weapon with the hand.

i've left the height as it is though. this is because when i made my pinkbox model i spent a bit of time trying to get the box the same size as the hitbox and the height of the model (with scaling set to 1 in the zym making stage) was 1.8 units tall. so when i made this newbones model i scaled the model to that size too. if i made it any larger than it is now you'd be able to shoot at the upper part of his head and not actually hit anything.

so if there are models bigger than this guy in the game make sure you don't go for the headshots.

What type of file do you export the blend file as? And yes I have already tried to find out.

killagrunt-
i've made this thread to answer some of your questions.

BTW he looks 2d

Really good work zuriastrad. I don't know know enough about blender to do anything with this myself but you found a problem, explained it well and developed a solution as well as a starting point for many new models. You are very knowledgeable in this and I hope you continue posting about your work. I'd love to see an A to Z tutorial on creating a character model and getting it in the game.

[-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.

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)

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

click here to download newbones-0003.pk3

Oh, that's interesting work.

I thought Blender and SMD were basically incompatible?

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.

zuriastrad wrote: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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nice

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.

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

[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.)

ihsan wrote: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.

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.

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.

zuriastrad wrote: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 wrote: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.

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