Export skeleton with several attached meshes from Blender

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pir
Posts: 24
Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2009 8:15 pm

Export skeleton with several attached meshes from Blender

Post by pir »

Hi!

I want to export an animated skeleton with several attached meshes from Blender.

The thing is that I get the impression that the exporters I've looked at only supports one connected mesh.

The exporters that I've tried are:
http://xoomer.virgilio.it/glabro1/python.html
http://www.gandaldf.com/downloads.html

Both exporters works really good when exporting a skeleton with only one mesh attached. But when I attach more meshes, the exporters don't work properly.

I can't find any posts about this, maybe I should try to solve my problem in some other way? Do I need to attach the meshes in my code instead?

(the reason why I want several meshes attached to one skeleton is that I want the eyes on my model to be separate meshes)


BR
pir
Mel
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Joined: Wed May 07, 2008 11:40 am
Location: Granada, Spain

Post by Mel »

Indeed, Skinned meshes work like that. Whatever you want to export, you have to export it as a single mesh (it doesn't have to be connected though, a single mesh can have multiple separated parts, or at least, the formats irrlicht is capable to read suppot something like that) but you have to treat the skinned mesh as a single object, or it won't work.

I guess that blender allows you to perhaps model things separate, and when all of them are done, you can put them all together into one single mesh wich is made of all the previous meshes you were working with.

Then what you can do is to create a model with the eyes attached to it so the whole thing is a single model, and then, add bones for the eyes so they can move on their own. What do you think of this?
"There is nothing truly useless, it always serves as a bad example". Arthur A. Schmitt
pir
Posts: 24
Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2009 8:15 pm

Post by pir »

Well, it sounds like something I should try. So you think that the parts of the bigger mesh do not need to be connected? That is, not connected by vertices. I suppose I will have to search some Blender forums to see how to do this. Maybe make the body mesh parent to eye meshes?

Anyway, thanks.

pir
pir
Posts: 24
Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2009 8:15 pm

Post by pir »

well, it didn't work.

So I'm trying to export the two meshes separate. The body mesh, with skeleton and animation, and the eye mesh. Then I'm trying to make the eye follow the movement of the head by setting it as child to the head bone (ISceneNode::setParent()). But the problem is that the eye mesh is placed wrong if this is done. If it's not set as a child, it is placed correctly in the scene. So I suppose that I there are some kind of transformation that the bone does which places the eye wrong. I really don't get it.

If someone has any tips of what to try, please tell me.

BR
pir
hayate
Posts: 43
Joined: Mon Feb 16, 2009 9:38 pm
Location: Brescia, Italy

Post by hayate »

Are you sure that the origin of your eyes is what you think it is? Maybe you need to consider that a child node's origin will be the position of the father node
Sorry for my awful english ^_^'
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