Domarius

Man, I quite literally buy all my games, through Steam and GOG.com (you'd like GOG, they just give you an exe file, no protection, and let you download it as many times as you want) Last time I bought a disc game was Modern Warfare 2 because it happened to be cheaper in the store and I didn't want to download all that. (it required online steam activation too) But I buy SOOO many games on steam, they have such fucking good deals if you watch for them. Can't remember the last time other than MW2 I bought a game from a store. And you can be sitting on your arse, going "Hm, that game looks fun" (click) and you've got it (either very soon or maybe in the morning if it's a huge one), and you never have to leave the house Hm, I never thought about selling games. In fact I don't think I've sold a game in my life. I guess by the time I'm ready to sell it, it would be so old that the re-sell would be too low for me to care what I get out of it, and I'd much rather keep it for reference (games are my career and passion), or if I made a bad choice and it sucked and I wanted to sell it, no one would buy it anyway Of course that's just me. But seriously, you're missing out on steam.

Update: to freeze the skeleton, I have to unbind it from the weighting - so I used the "export weights" feature of Maya to see if I could import the weights back after the freeze. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work - although surprisingly it seemed to work for most of the mesh but parts of it were very screwed up. I'll see if it's worth tweaking the result, or just resort to doing a quick re-weight. But in the worst case, at least the mesh and bones will be identical, if the weighting isn't - but I'll try and get it close enough.

Sorry for the laughable amount of time I've been putting in. I've worked out that if I import the md5mesh with its bones, it screws up the rotations, but it gets the translations right. And when I say "screws up", I mean they are physically at the right orientations, but the actual values for those do not match what is actually in the md5 mesh. Eg. after importing, the leg is in the correct position, but it has a rotationX value of 80, whereas the leg that exists in the md5mesh has a rotationX of 0, even though they both are in the exact same position. Fortunatly, all the rotations need to be at zero, so I can freeze rotations (and not translation or scale) to set them all to zero. This is good, because if the translations were also messed up, I'd be fucked, because they aren't all at zero. I wouldn't be able to get them back to what they should be, without somehow working out what their zero position is supposed to be, putting them in that position, freezing translations, and then offsetting them back to what they should be. So basically what this means is, I'll be able to make a noblewoman rig to animate with in Maya, that is pretty much an exact copy of the mesh and bones that are in game. So it should be accurate, and work for old animations as well.

Alright so I have to weight verts. I'll just get something pretty close without spending too much time on it, because it's only meant to be a guide. The main thing will be making sure she's got the new skeleton and all the controls are working properly.

Yeah that's the idea in this case. If I can be saved having to re-weight, at the bare minimum, we are all good. I was just under the impression that someone had done it before because there is a tutorial on the wiki. But perhaps that never included the weighting and skeleton? I think if this is the case, then I will just fall back to the noblewoman MB file. Would that still be useable as an animation rig?

Thanks I've got everything. With the exporting - I tried MB and DeepExploration said "Maya installation not found" (even though it is installed) so I tried OBJ and it seems to have come into Maya OK, except with no bones. Is that right? If not maybe you could just export her for me and I'll handle the rest.

Well I've got the noblewoman to work on for now, and I have deepexploratuon now, so I have stuff to do for the moment. So no hurry I guess but they should all get uploaded at some point. Builder priest would be next priority.

Probably he has an lwo file that you've worked on that isn't uploaded? I don't mean to keep asking the same thing over and over again, it's just that I haven't yet had a direct response as to whether all your lwo files are uploaded to model_src or not.

Hm I don't have Deep Exploration, perhaps you can convert the noblewoman LWO to MB then?

Cool. And you haven't got a lightwave file for the builder priest? He's the one with the badly weighted verts. Some verts in the crotch area are weighted to origin (very common mistake). I've already fixed it but haven't exported it to the game. His materials are pointing to texture files that don't seem to exist anymore, so I was wondering if there is a newer lightwave priest. Also it'd probably be worth uploading the lightwave files for anything you've worked on, to model_src. That way model_src does have the latest src needed to modify the game, and if your computer dies or something,, we don't lose all your work.

Cool - if you haven already, can you upload any light wave files to their model folders in model_src, that way I know if I can work from the mb file or not for mesh & weighting changes.

Depends, have you seen him sitting in a chair? Unweigted waist verts only show up when the hips displace far enough from the origin, and they usually don't move far in most animations so it's easy to miss. I only saw it cause the imported anim glitched out and moved him far. Sounds like the stocky character problem could be fixed by a combination of better weighting and anims that move the tummy better.

I tried out the stocky dudes, and there's no way we can get away without making stocky animations for them specifically, but some time can be saved by importing the existing animations and tweaking them. They need to be adjusted otherwise their arms clip through their bellies - and may as well make them actually move like fat people in the process. I think the forger is going to have to have his face guard removed or enlarged, his head clips through it all the time, which will happen often with the dynamic head turning. Builder priest has some unweighted verts around his waist which I'll need to fix.

Cool - if the lightwave files for the forger are uploaded (and any others you've worked on) I'll get onto those too.

Well, that settles it then. We can't use the md5mesh importer for Maya, it's probably ok for people wanting to rip models and muck around, but no good for serious work. Okay new plan - I'll get deep exploration, and convert your lightwave noblewoman to Maya, and add the handy controls to that. Even though it fucks up the mesh, that's not a problem because it should be good enough to animate with and we won't use that Maya file to export the mesh - we'll only use it to animate with, and the lightwave file remains the original source for the actual mesh. Sound good?