How the heck do you people animate your stuff?

drac_gd · Post by **drac_gd** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 12:50 pm

Your right, I overreacted. Your posts show you are a active and helpfull contributor in a allmost thankless enviroment.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 1:11 pm

I think this community is quite strong and very supportive. Maybe you should take some hours to rethink and probably change your state of mind before something really wrong happens.

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 1:35 pm

Ok, drac_gd, you and me both can have a not so good day after all

(I may have got a bit tired through the years(in several forums) of the activity of telling same tricks in many posts...You know, the panda many pages thread when I did I thought would be there as reference...But yep, is a bit buried... Like hundreds others..)

And also, in the attached parts and other matters, Vuen and you have reason, really I wish not so much tricks would be needed for make the x format work...But indeed, it's maybe, perhaps, also that format's fault...not really thought for games....I have been using doom3 *.md5 exported from Blender, and it went without all these problems. Indeed, I'd rather prefer if it were that simple. Reason why, for adding a more modern character animation format support, I sometimes vote for it...it'd rock, surely.

cyze · Post by **cyze** » Thu Jul 20, 2006 4:58 pm

Woho.. i got it to work!!

Using Blender 2.42 and the latest version of the directx-export script, and open and resave from mview it works perfectly! (big thanks to vermeer for uploading mview).

There is only one little issue, but im not sure if its related to exporting from Blender, or to Irrlicht. When i play the full animation cycle, there is a little jump, as if there was a frame with the original, unskinned mesh in the last frame of the animation. Is this a common problem?

Also... i found that the AnimatedMeshX class has accessfunctions for playing bundled animation sequences from the .X But AnimatedMeshX is a pure virtual class so i can't create instances of it. Can i get access to those functions from the sceneNode somehow?

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Thu Jul 20, 2006 6:52 pm

congrats !

indeed, Blender also worked for me since certain ben Omari version with blender 2.4x...

And with previous Blender versions, with both Jox and Ben's plugins...

The fact is if I recall well, you need to do sorta bake of the ipo curves, as is not translated with ben's plugin....Fortunately , the new pose mode constraints are supported, but I think the bake anim is needed yet, and dunno if even do the bake before start animating, some sort of trick I discovered...but this vagueness is as been a while since I was heading to use Irrlicht, since a while I'm working in a project with other engine and formats. Sorry for my unaccuracy here (and with panda matters)

What I can tell you is one way or the other Panda and Blender can work. And been told Maya too.

But as was stated, not every possibility will work.

Blender is getting really cool with newer and better anim features...

centipede · Post by **centipede** » Mon Jul 31, 2006 11:59 am

When I browse these forums, I notice a few people with weird mesh problems like I used to have (using Blender 2.42). I'm not talking about actions etc, which is problematic enough in itself, but simply that the meshes are messed up.

Ok, so for those who haven't examined the sourcecode:

THERE IS A BUG IN THE DIRECT-X READER!

... which has been fixed in SVN. Using Irrlicht-SDK-1.0 (unzip the source and compile yourself for fixing it), the file CXFileReader.cpp has a function called parseDataObjectMesh. It contains these lines:

Code: Select all

findNextNoneWhiteSpaceNumber();
		mesh.Vertices[n].X = readFloat();
		++P; // findNextNoneWhiteSpaceNumber();		
		mesh.Vertices[n].Y = readFloat();
		++P; // findNextNoneWhiteSpaceNumber();		
		mesh.Vertices[n].Z = readFloat();

I have no clue why the 'findNextNoneWhiteSpaceNumber' calls have been commented out. They appear to be essential, and without them, the vertex-coordinates being read are dead-wrong, simple as that.

Ok, so imagine the Blender-exporter produces vertices with spaces between coordinates (it does), and MView.exe fixes this to no spaces. That could explain why running a mesh through Mview is a good idea. Anyway, just uncomment the lines and you are good to go (or change the Blender-exporter script). Don't know what the DirectX spec says about the proper format, and I don't care.

But as said, it's all fixed in SVN.[/code]

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Mon Jul 31, 2006 12:37 pm

Yes, but there's also a patch for Irrlicht 1.0 available from my webpage. The spec does not say anything about spaces so I imagine they can be almost everywhere.

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Mon Jul 31, 2006 3:25 pm

actually, once we noticed stuff happening with simply different identation...but dunno if was our imagination...