Finally Decided to update my resourcer and I have a few major issues
the meshes are aligning very strangely compared to the joints (the joints are centered at the pivot points for the meshes that will be animated)
the mad file either crashes on export or hangs unless I delete the ANIM section
Here is a max render of it during travel
and during resourcing
Here is how it shows up in game
everything is really messed up and some things like the claws and plasma torches are in the right spot, but the other parts are not or even stacked on top of each other
Here is the joint hierarchy for the front end boring head
I have reset all xforms and rotations and collapsed meshes (I even reset xforms on the dummy joints and collapsed those)
I am not sure what else to do. I remember HW2 export through Maya had a similar issue but I donât remember how i solved it.
#2 animation crashing
when I enable animation export HODOR either crashes or it generates infinitely large files (GB if I let it), it does not seem to like my ANIM parameters
OPEN should run from 1 - 100 frames
ROTATE(during resourcing) is from 101-300
CLOSE is from 301-400
here is the ANIM section
I have played around with the actual times to line them up to specific frame, I have tried to put only one ANIM in I have also ensured that each animation step has been keyed inside the time range, still no luck getting HODOR to not crash. The example ships work and I canât see what I have done differentlyâŚ
I will be very interested to hear what yall find as I am also crashing HWR with my exported mad file. And the animated chunks of my ship are waaay off from where theyâre supposed to be. No problems generating the HOD and MAD from HODOR though.
Probably a dumb question on my part, but: Are you animating the meshes or are you animating the joints?
In the Taiidan Interceptor example, itâs the Joints that the wing meshes are children of that have all the keyframe data, not the meshes themselves. Since DAE does the coordinates of children objects in the local space of their parent. If youâre animating the mesh instead of the joint, the positioning might not be what you think it is after the DAE conversion.
@EvilleJedi - Sir, your issue (which Iâll make HODOR bitch about soon!) - is that youâve got animations on joints with the same name. More than a single node with the same Joint name. JNT[PLASMATORCH4] - youâve got a 2nd one with one of the Max âuniquifyingâ variant names: JNT[PLASMATORCH4]_ncl1_1
@sastrei - The issue may be on my end, related to âemptyâ animation channels. Iâll either fix it or explain what to do!
ALSO - Both of you are using BEZIER frames. The engine does support them, but right now only in NIS files. Though, hell - I think thereâs a fallback thatâs working in this case?
So whatâs the effect of using them? I do use bezier keyframes as well, my animation simply doesnât run. Is that what you would expect to happen in such case? The DAE export should bake the animation though, I have to check what keyframes are present after export.
Pouk, your issue may be something else - because the BEZIER frames are getting into the MAD files. I donât think theyâre gonna work quite right (I did the NIS work after the MAD stuff, so I actually havenât tried this much). One way or the other BEZIER will be okay soon - woo hoo.
Eh? No, BEZIER relates to the key-curvature types - use LINEAR, and youâll be golden until I put the next HODOR (and UNHOD) release out (I keep saying âsoonâ, but I mean âsoonâ, really!)âŚ
oooh yeah looks like I named the children right but the parent was copied. It would be great if hodor would make sure that the children of the weapon hardpoints/repair/capture are all consistent if that is important.
it looks like I should use the bezier key frames to do ramp rates and then force a few keys in between and set them to linear. I will try that and see what happens (as well as fixing the naming) will that fix the weird offsets in game though?
My dish animation is working now. Thanks @BitVenom!!!
Now to chase down those offset errors. @evillejedi how do you bring in your meshes to 3ds max? origins set to their rotation points and everybody clumped at 0,0,0 ?
also summoning @dkesserich as this thread will likely apply to the blender dae exporter as it has the same bezier/linear distinction.
Edit 2100 hrs: Eliminated the offset errors. Max was screwing with the origin point. Made use of the hierarchy tab and itâs âedit pivotâ tools to correct the issue.
As of right now, the Blender DAE exporter sets everything to LINEAR interpolation automatically.
Which I realize could be problematic if someone does want Bezier curves linking their keyframes (once HODOR supports it).
I think for Blender itâs going to have to be a âbake your curves to keys before exportingâ thing (might be able to automate that) instead of explicit bezier support. Especially since I donât have a bezier DAE to compare to, and then parsing that out and figuring out how to plug it into the exporter might be outside of my abilities.
well it looks like removing bezier allowed the export to finish and the animation works at least to the point that it needs to loop(doesnât loop)
ST: start frame in seconds
EN: end frame in seconds
LS: start of looping in seconds or is it offset from ST?
LE: end of looping in seconds or is it offset from ST?
The main issue However is I still have everything exploded into different orientations and shifted around all weird. It doesnât seem to have any logical pattern. Some elements are properly aligned, and others deeper in the hierarchy are not or are relative to the hierarchy but shifted in the wrong axis.
collapsed modifiers, reset xforms, checked the 90 rotation on each joint, disabled animation everything looks fine in max.
the DAE also imports back into max looking fine. I guess Iâm going to rerig it from scratch piece by piece and see what is broken.
So generally, LS/LE are zero. The decision to loop or not is made elsewhere (in the event or madstate that triggers the anim, if I recall?).
ALSO
STF/ENF/LSF/LEF - The extra âFâ means Frame instead of defaulting to seconds. Can be way more efficient to use that depending on your software package.
As for rigging - It is extremely important to look at the Examples - the meshes are sitting with no transforms relative to their joints. ZERO. The joints get animated in a hierarchy - the meshes just come along for the ride. Often Iâll see a mesh which has a center and bounding-box super, super far from 0,0,0 (local) - and you can just tell itâs going to animate poorly because itâs moving relative to a joint that is nowhere near it.
started using STF ENF, works great, however the
LSF and LEF need to be set to zero like you said otherwise the animation doesnât play
One of the things I found is that the X:90 rotation was NOT being propagated through the joints to the meshes like the examples (they showed 0,0,0 rotation, the examples had 90,0,0) When I rotated the pivot points X:90 the meshes ended up in the right orientation in game, but were still translated all over the place. (it would be helpful if hodor stated which mesh threw the WARNING - Unable to locate Geo instance under Root
- check for un-reset xformâŚ?. I had to go mesh by mesh reseting xform and collapsing since it seems like HODOR does not like the pivot point being rotated without a xform reset, which is something that doesnât show up on the 3dsmax modifier stack)
so I parented all of the meshes to the ROOT_LOD[0] instead of their JNT for animation and now everything lines up in game (no animation obviously) So for static ships I know how to properly line everything up.
Lining up the pivot point with the animation joints seems to have fixed most of the issues, however sometimes I am getting things flipped 180 degrees in game even though the pivot for the joint and the mesh are aligned at frame 0
I also have a problem where markers that are under a joint are playing the effect at ship 0,0,0 position. I have tried playing around with the pivots but have not had any success getting them in position without moving them to the ROOT_LOD and therefor not having them animated.
