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3 Dimensional Chat / no animations when exporting to .x from blender

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Penfold
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Posted: 12th Mar 2012 23:33
I've spent about an hour searching forums here and on blender sites but cant seem to find asolution. Unforts it seems most of the export issues are Uv or FPS issues so I cant find what im looking for.

Ive managed to finally rig a test model in blender get all the uv maps on it ok and boe it with a simple frame - the wings flap every 60 frames ,

my blender is settup to export .x but in a test bench and game the animaion dont seem to be attached.

I'm using blender 2.6.. but im not sure if theres something im missing like save with animations.

Thanks in advance for any help,

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Penfold
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Posted: 13th Mar 2012 12:53
Ok , so after 2 more hours searching and a refreshed start I've found how to get some of the animation to export.

(theres an option tab on the save window - I must have missed a hundred times)

So it saving my *speeded* up 60 frames of animation but its only animating the core part of the model nothing that is adjust with limbs - only the change in x,y,z to the main model.

So at present my littel winged guy is bobbing backwards and forwards but his little wings arent flapping. any of you lovely blender chaps (or chappesses) have any idea why its not exporting the boned bit?

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maho76
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Posted: 13th Mar 2012 13:59
attached how i export from blender. maybe you havent applied rotation and scale for all objects before started to animate (ctrl+a)?

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Penfold
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Posted: 13th Mar 2012 16:33 Edited at: 13th Mar 2012 16:40
Hmm wasnt aware I needed to apply rotation and scale...

yeah your setting are the same as mine except I dont flip my polys.

will look at the ctrl-a thing right now

<edited>

really getting anoyed at the fact my bones have to be on view when I mod everything.

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Posted: 13th Mar 2012 16:56 Edited at: 13th Mar 2012 17:04
I went back did ctrl-a and it reset everything. so i rebuilt the animation but it still doesnt pass the animation information regarding the wing/bones.

<edited>

I've now used your settings exactly and still no joy. looks the same...

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maho76
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Posted: 13th Mar 2012 18:32 Edited at: 13th Mar 2012 18:35
just for interest: wich prog you use to view/run x-files? dbpro directly or some engine like fpsc?

maybe you have to name the bones, or name a ROOTbone or something like that so the prog knows how to handle the file or select the animation.

Quote: "really getting anoyed at the fact my bones have to be on view when I mod everything."


annoyed that they are in view or that you wish they were in view?^^

tip1: bone > object propperties > x-ray makes bones always visible in front.

tip2: view/hide eye-button in the outliner-window (see pic attached)

sorry if it doesnt help, i am new to blender, too.


maho

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Penfold
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Posted: 13th Mar 2012 18:42
Quote: "just for interest: wich prog you use to view/run x-files? dbpro directly or some engine like fpsc?"


I have a file in my project which loads it in DB. so I can view it as it would be onscreen.

Quote: "maybe you have to name the bones, or name a ROOTbone or something like that so the prog knows how to handle the file or select the animation."


Renamed the core bone to spine. No change

Quote: "annoyed that they are in view or that you wish they were in view?^^"


anoyed that they have to be in view when you make keyframes. TBH its a little annoying I have to create keyrames for each individual bone adaptation. rather than just making a key for all visable objects.

Its a bit pants , I'm not even sure 2.6 can export this data. of the 9 billion google hits only 1 or 2 are about 2.6 and none of them about my specific problem.

Any Blender-Gods out there to help?

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Ortu
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Posted: 14th Mar 2012 05:14 Edited at: 14th Mar 2012 05:21
Quote: " but its only animating the core part of the model nothing that is adjust with limbs - only the change in x,y,z to the main model."


something sounds a bit off here... I think it help if we knew a bit more about the model and how you are trying to use it.

What kind of keys are you inserting? if you are only seeing change to x,y,z are you inserting position keys only? I generally use loc+rot+scale.

you talk about limbs... are these 'limbs' as in children objects of a parent object, or just a more general arms and legs kind of usage?

do all bones belong to a single armature? are they all linked through parenting ultimately to the root? I believe disconnected floating bones within the armature are ok as long as they are still linked in the hierarchy.

how are you attempting to play the animation in DBpro? I've come across cases where loop object objectnumber,startframe didn't work properly but both loop object objectnumber and loop object objectnumber,startframe,endframe did work.

Quote: "anoyed that they have to be in view when you make keyframes."


not quite sure what you are meaning here. if they aren't in view, how would you manipulate them into different positions to set new keyframes? I mean you can set up IPO drivers to control them with widgets I suppose but the keys would be inserted for the control objects rather than the bones directly and .x format doesn't support the constraints you would need. I don't get the sense that you are trying to set up a complex rig system like that anyway.

Quote: "TBH its a little annoying I have to create keyrames for each individual bone adaptation. rather than just making a key for all visable objects."


inserting a key will do it for all selected bones at once, you can only work with bones for 1 armature at a time, and this is what seems off in that first quote I guess. You should really only be working with 1 object and 1 armature for that object at a time. Some screen shots are a better explaination of how exactly you are setting this up and how you are trying to use it would help.

I don't know if you came across this thread in your searching, it has a bunch of other stuff going on, but there is some good info about animation exports if you pick through it. past the halfway mark I think

http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=192877&b=3

If your model/armature is at all complex, you might consider trying something simpler just to get the process working, then see how to apply it to something more.

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Posted: 14th Mar 2012 20:12 Edited at: 14th Mar 2012 20:20
Quote: "What kind of keys are you inserting? if you are only seeing change to x,y,z are you inserting position keys only? I generally use loc+rot+scale."

yes I'm doing l,r,s I wasnt when i started but I figured that out. It won animate in blender properly without these.

Quote: "you talk about limbs... are these 'limbs' as in children objects of a parent object, or just a more general arms and legs kind of usage?"

In this case I used the wrong words I meant the bones of the armature.

Quote: "do all bones belong to a single armature? are they all linked through parenting ultimately to the root? I believe disconnected floating bones within the armature are ok as long as they are still linked in the hierarchy"

single armature - 2 bones from the top of the spine for the top part of the wings and 2 bones joined on to these for the lower wing-tips. Ive also renamed all the bones as in a lot of places this says it could be an issue.

Quote: "Quote: "anoyed that they have to be in view when you make keyframes.""

to quote my quote - I meant if you select all and the bones are visable then creating a keyframe i would have though meant youve created a key for them but you have to select each bone individually to do this.. not really relevant as Ican work round this its getting used to what the gui can and cant do.

Will try doing the bendy box thing you put in the other post to see if I can get that to export properly. btw if I load and looop the object animation ie loop object x, the object bobs backwads and fowards in sync with the general z movement I animated - no bone animation. If load and loop object x,start frame,endframe it seemingly does nothing (which is the opposite to what you said if i read it correctly?)<EDIED>Actually Loop object x and loop object x,1,60 work as well as each other. I had the speed altered when I tried it last.

will post a couple of images in a sec really basic mesh with 5 bones for wing movement.

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Posted: 14th Mar 2012 20:43
Animation at frame 30 and 60 fully boned and animated.



expanded bone and object fields



and the settings I export at



apoologies for the large images but I dont have access to a computer with anything but paint right now

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Posted: 14th Mar 2012 23:45
Totally Wierd I copied your example in the other thread to the letter and it exports perfectly fine

WTF (what the Flip) is going wrong with mine...

be back in an hour..

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Posted: 15th Mar 2012 01:42
Nope cant figure it out. unless 2.6 doesnt support multiple bones or something wierd. I thought it might be because I've grouped them wrong but I cant seem to remove my armature from my model..

Ive also been looking at teh dope sheet .. not sure if the diamonds should all be orange not white and if I should have solid orange lines between them to say I have movement between the 2 steps. as the online documentation seemingly doesnt exist yet for the dope sheet I cant be sure.

Could be while messing around I've changed a setting I suppose but dont think its likely tbh as I'd probably have a fairly good idea which one is causing the issue.

witout reimporting the model and starting from scratch I dunno what else to do.

Anyway attached is the blender file if the uploader works.

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Ortu
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Posted: 15th Mar 2012 02:35 Edited at: 15th Mar 2012 03:34
ok my man, i got it working.

Not really sure where you went wrong, at one point I got an error about circular dependancies between object and armature, and it looks like you may have set it to animate by envelopes. I couldn't correct what you had so i deleted the armature and cleared all animation data then rebuilt it.

when you parent make sure you parent the object (select first) to the armature (select second) and do it as automatic weights. you can edit the weighting from there.

attached are the exported .x

Quote: "- I meant if you select all and the bones are visable then creating a keyframe i would have though meant youve created a key for them but you have to select each bone individually to do this"


You really don't have to do bones individually. Select all and insert and it will set keys for all selected

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Posted: 15th Mar 2012 02:36
here is the edited .blend

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Posted: 15th Mar 2012 13:25
ok , so yours work .. great so to try and redo and remake the results myself....

FAIL on my part, something is really wrong I deleted the armature and rebuilt it now I get the following errors.



I am stumped.

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maho76
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Posted: 15th Mar 2012 14:10
check that you only export the model. the mass of errors normally happens when trying to export x-file with lights or displaced parts of the mesh. search your map for little meshparts, sometimes happens (especially when moving meshes into others) that it cuts out some tiny pieces that remain on the map. delete everything except model and bones before export or select object/bones and set export settings to "export: selected objects".

hope it helps.

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Posted: 15th Mar 2012 17:26
I dont know whats going on as soon as I add the armatures to the export of the .x it crashes with the above errors. something is majorly up.

I think I might have to resort going back to lightwave to rig and just use the blender to UV unwrap.

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Ortu
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Posted: 16th Mar 2012 04:04
It's a delicate process, the smallest error crashes the whole thing. A lot of issues stem from .x file type itself. It takes some trial and error to get the process down but it's a lot smoother once you do. I would scrap this file and start from scratch. Once unknown errors creep in it can be really hard to correct. If nothing else, extra modeling practice is never a waste

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Posted: 19th Mar 2012 14:01
we shall see. I have plenty of modelling experience... well lots of half finished projects. My business needs me to concentrate on that at the moment with the end of the financial year coming up.

..So this will have to sit as a back project again for a couple of weeks unless I mysteriously get some time to dabble.

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Posted: 20th Mar 2012 11:16
seems like its taken forever but I got my first rigged animated and uv'd model out and into DBP. I had to delete the bones and reapply 3 times before I got it to work.

So I shall keep with my current work plan.
Model in lightwave. triple.
import into blender unwrap bone and animate.
export into .x for Dark Basic

Now I know I can do it I can work on far more complicated models.

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Ortu
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Posted: 21st Mar 2012 02:15
nice glad you got it working

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Posted: 21st Mar 2012 14:17
Yup even have a rigged body model walking that I put together in under an hour (352 triangle body,no head . and 15 bone armature) which hasnt crashed once on me yet.

I even figured out how to duplicate the boe positions i the dope sheet without help as there doesnt seem to be any help files for that in 2.6 and the dope sheet didnt eem to exist before then.

Its all good. Got a lose friend doing some proto scetches for some humanod characters we'll see how well I can do those soon.

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