g-spot Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 (NOTE this problem has been fixed, read my second reply in this thread) Background: Using 3D Studio MAX 5, and have downloaded some tutorials including the one from Spacemonkey for JO.. Photoshop and Deep Paint 3D 2.0 for skins... My friend and I have been hard out the last week making a playermodel, and now have reduced the polys, segmented, capped, uv mapped, skinned, and attached a downloaded kyle bone structure using Skin modifiers (weighted)... I then used the linker script to link the objects based on name. Next we thought hmm, now we export and assimilate, right... Think again... 1. I used the default settings in the XSI exporter for MAX, and unchecked the "Animation" box... 2. Then called the file root.xsi in the models/players/_humanoid folder... 3. Copyed a copy of the _humanoid.gla file to that folder... 4a. Put assimilate in c:\base folder 4b. Put carcass in c:\base\models\players\_humanoid folder 5. Ran assimilate, figured out how to do the prefs... Added the _humanoid.gla file... Clicked the B button Chose _humanoid.car as the name of file 6. then carcass pops up in a window with: Carcass (GLA/GLM compiler) v2.1. © Raven Software 1998-2003. Written by Gil Gribb, Ste Cork, James Monroe, Mike Crowns -------- C:\base\models\players\_humanoid\_humanoid.car -------- ( Build trigger: "c:\base\models\players\_humanoid\_humanoid.glm" missing ) entering c:\base\models\players\_humanoid\_humanoid.car (90 degree skewing OFF) Loading GLA "models/players/_humanoid/_humanoid.gla"...21376 frames ( Using bonecap file: "c:/base/models/players/_humanoid/_humanoid.bonecap" ) Grabbed 1 files with 21376 frames Processing 'c:/base/models/players/_humanoid/root.XSI' Unable to find bone "upper_lumbar" referenced in this mesh ( Press any Key ... ) So Carcass thinks there is no upper_lumbar bone... (The first time I ran it, it thought there was no lower_lumbar bone, so I chose "Export bones as geometry" instead of the default "export bones as null" option in the XSI exporter options...) So, I had a look in root.xsi with notepad... and saw there is an upper_lumbar in there... but obviously something is wrong... Any tips? Should I use the "DaVinciMale.bonename" naming style as seen in the root.xsi file included with the SDK? Oh, and I've learned a whole lot about welding, UWV mapping, and weighting in the last 4 days... whew, don't do anything in the wrong order, or you'll pay for it in the next stage, thats for sure... -Gspot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
g-spot Posted December 12, 2003 Author Share Posted December 12, 2003 Oh, also I'm using the latest version of the XSI exporter from Softimage, which is most likely a different version from the one included in the old JO pack from Lucas... I can't seem to find the old pack, so if someone has that old exporter, I'll try that one... -Gspot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
g-spot Posted December 12, 2003 Author Share Posted December 12, 2003 OOPS!! found the problem!! One of our team of two (me or JAGuar) accidentally added a skin modifier to the "lower_lumbar" bone DOH!!! Once I deleted it it was ok (well sort of...) We then found out about the 3D Studio MAX mirroring bug/feature that mirrors the pivot point, thus the right leg and arm and hand were in reverse... That was a stumper... Fixed it by attaching the mirrored leg to the good original leg then detaching it, thus the pivot stayed the same... then copied the envelopes and weighting by saving it to a file (in the skin modifier panel), then applying a skin mod to the newly detached leg, adding the correct bones, then loading the envelope from the file of the good leg... The save/load didn't work so well on the fingers, but everything else was sweet... (side note: we forgot to delete the extra bones from the JO kyle skele before we started weighting, so we had to redo the fingers after deleting the bones to make the simplified JA skeleton...) Eventually, after re-linking, and manually linking the eyes and mouth which I had called an incorrect name, we got the model to compile with carcass.. I then noticed that one of our texture files was 768x768 which is not supported, so we resized it to 512... After a quick test in the game, and some further looking around at the animations in ModView, we discovered that the vertices would have to be weighted by hand, as the envelopes were inaccurate, and the crotch/legs, shoulders, etc were a bit nasty (looked painful )... Overall, this has been a learning experience... Good though, only took a week of two people working hard to make a model work in the game... From what I've learned, you must have the correct workflow to get though without redoing everything 2 or more times... I may have to make a new tutorial based on some of the old ones, with notes for newbies... Now, back to that exact weighting... -Gspot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pipedream Posted December 13, 2003 Share Posted December 13, 2003 Thats a creative approach to the mirror problem! Your other option in cases like this is to apply an XForm modifier to the affected geometry, then drag that modifier below the skin modifier. Collapse the XForm *to* (not collapse all). After this you may have to flip all the face normals... Actually, I like your method better As for weighting, I always do that by hand for game models. It seems a pain in the arse, but its the only way to get things just right. One other timesaver would be to check the deformation of your model before you get too deep into the texturing process. Just in case you need to refine the mesh further in places... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.