blender and .md2

HKurban · Post by **HKurban** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 2:55 am

I am currently working on a 3d RTS game using Irrlicht. And I was told the best animation format for this engine was ".md2". I was happy to see blender had an exporter for .md2, but when I tried it out on a simple infantry model, I ran into some problems. (By the way, I am using blender 2.42, so if theres a fix for any of these problems, let me know.)

1. The exporter does not seem to want to have an object with its point of origin anywhere but the 0 coordinate plane, and it will "fix it" automatically for that.

2. It does not seem to want to export more than one mesh as a single model (I have the infantry and his weapon). Is this normal?

3. I now know that you must have the mesh UV Mapped even if there is no texture, but during export, how will I apply a texture? Does it just use the texture I assign in blender? Do I have to just type the location of the texture (C/blahblahblah/texture.jpg)? If not, then what?

4. can alpha/transparency maps be applied? (I have a dxt editor that allows textures to retain color and alpha maps within the same file, but I dont know if .md2 will accept this format.

5. Are there any special parameters for animation with the .md2 format, such as limitations on movement/armature usage, etc?

6. Will .md2 retain particle information? (for instance, if I make an explosion in blender, will I be able to export it to .md2?)

If someone can answer any of these questions, I would greatly appreciate it.

kburkhart84 · Post by **kburkhart84** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 5:26 am

OK. Your first mistake is insisting that you have to use md2. I don't think it is necesary, and you may find it easier to get .b3d files from Blender. Several of these problems will probably be solved by trying a different method. Also, I'm not sure how you expect the explosions to go from Blender to Irrlicht. It might be better to use IrrEdit to create your explosions and save them there. As for question 2, I believe that may be normal. The original md2 files have the weapons separately so may not be able to handle it together. Now, if in Blender, you model the weapon like now, but merge them into the same object, then it would probably work. Also, check out the differences between skeletal animation and keyframe animation. md2 does keyframes while b3d, x, and ms3d do skeletal animation. I won't explain, but do a search to see the benefits.

HKurban · Post by **HKurban** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 6:31 am

Ok, I am not the programmer though, so for his sake, will each of those three formats be just as easy to incorporate into the game?

kburkhart84 · Post by **kburkhart84** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 3:14 pm

If Irrlicht is being used(I hope since this is Irrlicht website), then yes. But, the harder part may be properly exporting the format from whatever program you use.

HKurban · Post by **HKurban** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 8:56 pm

So far I can only find the blender built in exporters for .md2 and .x

the .x exporter screws up the model so that none of the verticies are connected.

the .md2 exporter says "Model has a face without a texture map" and does not let me continue.

kburkhart84 · Post by **kburkhart84** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 1:54 pm

HKurban wrote:So far I can only find the blender built in exporters for .md2 and .x

the .x exporter screws up the model so that none of the verticies are connected.

the .md2 exporter says "Model has a face without a texture map" and does not let me continue.

Yeah, .x exporters for Blender are usually buggy. Try to find the .b3d export instead. Also, the md2 exporter is requireing all faces be UVmapped and textured, so youhave to do that as well before export. Now, in Irrlicht, you can use whatever texture you want for the material, but the .md2 file has that limitation. I'd try .b3d.