Hi mates, I created a guide about creating a player model for Nexuiz in Blender, it's 11 pages long + images. It still lacks about shaders, but for the other things I think it could be useful!
Let me know what do you think!

http://www.box.net/shared/gs5v5tfyo0

I'll have to follow the steps exactly to make sure that you didn't miss anything but this guide seems just fine. It actually takes you through a lot more than just player models and it does it all in linux which should be clearly mentioned.

About the NLA "bug":
i could be entirely wrong about this but i think the NLA editor is made for blending actions. The zym importer seems to import all animations to the NLA editor blended together at 100% weight so when you move the slider only the frames of the top action is visible. I notice you overcame this by hiding all the anims (so the selected only would animate), this is not necessary. Instead you should click the NLA logo at the top of the actions tree and it will switch to the action editor logo. In this mode only the selected action is visible. No NLA layer blending is applied.

And another note about your zymscript:
I found that is better to not let zmodel do any transformations in the export stage. Centre and scale your model and animations in blender. To do this quickly, when i have the scale and centres correct out of the exporter, i would then import the created zym and reset my zymscript.txt transformations to none, i.e.

origin 0 0 0
rotate 0
scale 1

(Manually scaling and moving the animations/mesh in blender can lead to some unexpected results when creating the zym.)

With these settings you get a workflow hinged around zym editing. You don't really need to keep blender files lying around at all, just import the zym, edit it, export the mesh+anims and let zmodel overwrite it in the zym creation stage.

Good work.

Thx Ihsan for your precious hints!But there's something I'd like to point, because I didn't understand well what you said

Instead you should click the NLA logo at the top of the actions tree and it will switch to the action editor logo. In this mode only the selected action is visible. No NLA layer blending is applied.

Thx a lot!!I didn't know it!There's no day, without learning something from Blender!Thanks to your very precious hint, I was be able to export marine model from zym import to zym export!Wow!

And another note about your zymscript:
I found that is better to not let zmodel do any transformations in the export stage. Centre and scale your model and animations in blender. To do this quickly, when i have the scale and centres correct out of the exporter, i would then import the created zym and reset my zymscript.txt transformations to none, i.e.

Sorry, I didn't understand, what should I do, I should resize directly in Blender or not? Because I know that rescaling objects with armature attached is a dangerous way

Manually scaling and moving the animations/mesh in blender can lead to some unexpected results when creating the zym.)

Infact I always scaled AFTER with zymscript.txt, never in Blender. Can you please explain these last steps so I can change the procedure in the guide.

P.S.Your name is already in the credits list!

toneddu2000 wrote:Thx Ihsan for your precious hints!But there's something I'd like to point, because I didn't understand well what you said

And another note about your zymscript:
I found that is better to not let zmodel do any transformations in the export stage. Centre and scale your model and animations in blender. To do this quickly, when i have the scale and centres correct out of the exporter, i would then import the created zym and reset my zymscript.txt transformations to none, i.e.

Sorry, I didn't understand, what should I do, I should resize directly in Blender or not? Because I know that rescaling objects with armature attached is a dangerous way

Manually scaling and moving the animations/mesh in blender can lead to some unexpected results when creating the zym.)

Infact I always scaled AFTER with zymscript.txt, never in Blender. Can you please explain these last steps so I can change the procedure in the guide.

P.S.Your name is already in the credits list!

Sorry, i knew i wasn't being really clear so let me start over.

Lets say you just made your new character from scratch in blender, anims and all but when you export he's the wrong size. The easiest thing to do is to scale the zym by zymscript.txt but the don't forget, the blender file is still the wrong size. I was just suggesting that you then re-import the exported zym so you have a properly scaled and centered model in blender.

Yeah, I made a test! It works also in the way you described. I created a new marine model imported from a zym, then I re-imported it in blender, I scaled it a bit (well, actually , a lot! )and re-exported as zym and it works! I continue to prefer the zymscript method because is 20 times faster, but, can you please explain what problems occured when you used the zymscript method?
Because, I've used it in these days minimum 40 times and it worked always flawless!

Version 0.5
http://www.box.net/shared/2irr8q5d0x (only pdf, you must have also 0.4 zip version)

There was a huge error about downloading Zmodel (I wrote that it was in the qclib folder in the nexuiz SVN, but that's fteqcc! (I made a little confusion! ), and now I put credits at the end of the guide and I wrote what ihsan told me about using already existent zym files.

Please read it!

Im downlading your guide. Thank you for that.

thank you for downloading, giuseppe! If you have time, please take note of some errors or imperfections(if there are, but I'm quite sure that there are)!