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Revenant Maya Issues


greebo

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I uploaded a .mb file to model_src/revenant/idle.mb. This contains the Revenant mesh as imported via the MD5 > Blender > OBJ > Maya path, and I could rig some parts of the revenant mesh/skin to the animation rig of the proguard. Most controls are working and I could in theory animate the guy.

 

However there are some troubles: Whenever I use the hip_ctrl to rotate the revenant the whole body including legs and everything is turning alongside. Comparing the behaviour of the proguard, only the hips should rotate and the feet should stay where they are.

 

What can I do to prevent the hip_ctrl from rotating the entire mesh? I know that the "move_ctrl" rotates/translates the entire body (as it should), but the hip_ctrl somehow does the same which is odd.

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I looked at your scene and it seems the ik handles are broken. I couldn't find the reason and it only happened in that particular scene even if i create a new joint leg with an ik handle i couldn't move the joints with the ik handle.

 

but once i imported the rig in a new scene the ik handles worked again. I uploaded the cleaned up rig in the revenant folder. I noticed the mesh is on some places(lower legs for instance) placed besides the joints.

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Took a quick look, it seems something is messed up with the Skeleton and IK Solvers.

They don't actually drive the joints for some reason, unlike on the proguard - so they aren't held "in place" when the hip is moved.

 

Edit :

I need to type faster, how do i delete a post ? :D

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Thanks for the help - I'll have a look at the fixed file. :)

 

I just imported the mesh from the .md5mesh file, and I didn't change the proguard skeleton at all, that's why parts of the mesh are not exactly intersecting (in the Bind Pose, that is). I assume this is a bad thing?

 

I'm also not through with weigh-painting the guy, and I don't think he's go a shadow mesh. So there's still some footwork to be done, but I'll try to keep at it.

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Ok, I managed to weight the revenant to the animation rig, and I could import the idle animation from the proguard, which is playing nicely. :) The fingers are not quite correctly moving I think, but I believe this is just a matter of patience to fix that.

 

I'll go ahead and try to export the revenant from Maya to Doom 3 now, to test whether this works at all.

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Hm, not quite - the export process works fine and the af_pose looks about right, but the idle forces the arms to some weird positions.

 

rev1.jpg rev2.jpg

 

You can see that the skeleton is somehow not matching up with the mesh - I guess this is because the joints in Maya don't exactly match the fingers of the skin/mesh? (Also, ignore the proguard head in his belly, it's just the testmodel. ^^)

 

Also, I noticed too late that the revenant consists of two submeshes with one shader each - I now have one monolithic mesh in Maya, but I need two in-game. I guess I'll need to re-export the stuff and re-weight it?

 

It's strange, because the anim in Maya looks and plays just fine.

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For the first time ever, coincidentally perhaps, I noticed a guards arms taking on a raised position while searching around yesterday, so he was walking around like a zombie. It was just affecting one axis, or looked like it. I wonder if its related. Have you tried reloading the map?

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It's definitely not the map, I could rule out any entityDef issues as well. It most probably is the mesh in the Maya file which is too large and gets distorted somehow. I'm currently re-painting the revenant in Maya, this time split into pieces, but I'm having a hell of a time trying to paint the head. Everytime I paint some vertices the changes are not preserved - I change to another influence/joint and all my painted weights are reverted back to what they were before. WTF!

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Heres something that mentions having the verts on "HOLD":

http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-154084.html

 

Maybe this offers a clue?

http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-156979.html

 

When you select a vert or mesh section, is it frozen or muted?

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Yes, thanks, the first link gave me a clue. I could finally weight the vertices manually in the Component Editor - what a pain! Nothing was on hold or locked, or frozen as far as I could see, but anyways, it seems to work now.

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I had to start over, because the revenant md5mesh needs to contain 2 meshes, one for the top and one for the bottom. When importing a single .obj file this separation is lost and the resulting md5mesh is unusable.

 

Therefore I went ahead and imported two separate .obj files into Maya, which is not a problem. The problems start as soon as I "Smooth Bind" the second mesh to the skeleton in Maya. This is what spawns out in-game, I'd say this is directly from hell:

 

gamall_anyone.jpg

 

My steps so far:

 

- Import an OBJ file (rev_top)

- Select it, Delete By Type > History, then Freeze Transformation

- Select the origin joint, then "Select Hierarchy", then select the rev_top Mesh, then "Smooth Bind"

- [Checking it out in-game, the model works fine]

- Back to Maya, I go ahead and import the second OBJ file (rev_bottom)

- Select it, Delete By Type > History, then Freeze Transformation

- Select the origin joint, then "Select Hierarchy", then select the rev_bottom Mesh, then "Smooth Bind"

- Save, export the .md5mesh and the result is the above screenshot. WTF?

 

Any hints what I might be doing wrong? I see that the proguard consists of multiple meshes and these work just fine, so which step am I doing wrong such that binding the second mesh screws up so badly?

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Not to throw another wrench in the works, but has the revenant been properly subdivided by material type? Assuming that the player can damage the creature by striking bone (which may be a false assumption) then the metal, bone and chainmail parts would have to be separated so they could be assigned to different material shaders.

 

I could do that fairly easy once you're done, by working from the updated md5mesh, if you like.

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Did you try to import both meshes in one go, select both, select the root-joint, then do the Smooth-Bind ?

Maybe the exporter doesn't cope well with multiple skin-cluster nodes.

I cannot select multiple files in the import dialog, but I tried to get close to that, i.e. imported both OBJ files, then selected both meshes, deleted their history, froze their transformations, and then bound them to the origin(+hierarchy). As soon as the second mesh is bound, things go insane, but yet the proguard has 5 or 6 meshes in it and it seems to work, so I think the exporter is fine.

 

I can upload the messed up Maya binary, if somebody wants to look at it, but somehow I feel guilty if I'm taking away time from squill or Noisycricket to remedy my noobness.

 

Not to throw another wrench in the works, but has the revenant been properly subdivided by material type? Assuming that the player can damage the creature by striking bone (which may be a false assumption) then the metal, bone and chainmail parts would have to be separated so they could be assigned to different material shaders.

What I'm aiming at is to have the source mesh in Maya, without needing to "hack" the md5mesh afterwards. This includes a shadowmesh (which I can import afterwards if you have one for me) and all the split meshes should be there right in Maya. Otherwise we have a discrepancy like with the proguard md5mesh, where we have two md5mesh files for the same character, which is not as clean as I'd like it to be.

 

That said, the revenant is split into two pieces right now: the body and the armor. So the metal parts are already split off (consisting of boots and breast plate), but the rest is all one mesh. The body also includes the chains, but I guess that's ok as they won't block projectiles or swords. The head is still part of the body though.

 

If you have a split mesh or a shadow mesh available, I'm happy to import it to Maya and weight-paint the meshes (it's not all that hard, now that I've done it three times :rolleyes:), but first I'll need to figure out how to export more than one mesh, of course.

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I can upload the messed up Maya binary, if somebody wants to look at it, but somehow I feel guilty if I'm taking away time from squill or Noisycricket to remedy my noobness.

 

don't worry, i see the same thing this time with the forger, it looks like he's been thru the hands of a bad experimental artist. I haven't seen this happen with the proguard but i should indeed work with multiple meshes.

 

The only thing with meshes that go thru different applications are program specific things like nodes and other model related things that could still be attached to the meshes and cause problems in other applications. I've seen this happen at work so it's always nice to start with a clean mesh.

 

today i've got some free time so i can deeper investigate this thing and hopefully upload the forger mesh.

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So you're saying you're seeing the same problems (heavily distorted AI in-game) with the forger?

 

I'm not sure whether it is an issue with the data imported from the OBJ file - after all I can Smooth Bind such a mesh to the skeleton and it actually works in-game, only with 2 meshes it goes horribly wrong.

 

Could it be something with Maya 2008? (I guess not, as the proguard works.)

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If you have a split mesh or a shadow mesh available

 

I haven't actually done any work on the revenant. I know the mesh does need some fixing up (there are several transparent gaps), and IIRC the normalmap is inverted.

 

I could make a shadowmesh, but I'm not sure of the exact proportions of the mesh you're working on. I have Odd's original .lwo model, but I don't think it's the same size as our skeleton, so you've probably reduced the size of yours. I don't think I can import .mbs into LW, though I can work with the .md5mesh files with no problems.

 

I can only think of two ways to work on the mesh from my end--either work with the original and then give it to you to re-weight (and that's still buggy as I don't know how to export more than one mesh to an .obj file), or work with the md5mesh after you've finished rigging it (which results in the most up to date copy being a .lwo file).

 

It's a shame there's not a decent md5mesh importer for maya...then the md5mesh itself would always be the most up to date file, and we wouldn't have to worry about it.

 

The head is still part of the body though.

 

Not sure if that's a problem or not. Probably easier to remove the head, however, in case we want the skull to animate when it talks. Players might also want to swap in other heads, theoretically.

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It's a shame there's not a decent md5mesh importer for maya...then the md5mesh itself would always be the most up to date file, and we wouldn't have to worry about it.

 

actually for the forger i used the md5mesh importer for maya to work with the latest md5mesh that you created. Also because the uv's in the obj files are flipped. Only difference once you import is you lose any smoothing groups but that's simple to adjust.

 

Not sure if that's a problem or not. Probably easier to remove the head, however, in case we want the skull to animate when it talks. Players might also want to swap in other heads, theoretically.

 

I understand the thing with the separated head, but what if you want to animate a conversation with nice facial animation? If i for instance have to animate a character talking i like to do the facial animation on the face in the same scene that has the body movements. Have there been thoughts about having character setup with full facial(joints in the face) controls?

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i tested some more things:

 

- replacement meshes(simple boxes) gives the same results. Binding 1 mesh will still work.

- proguard exports fine, until you detach the meshes from the skeleton and rebind again, then you'll get the same results. Could it be the 2008 export plugin? unfortunately i couldn't install maya 7 next to 2008.

- Exporting animation with this 2008 plugin works fine though.

 

i did more then listed above but in short i haven't yet found a working solution. If i want to install maya 7 properly i'll have to remove 2008 first and then install maya 7 but i can't do that at the moment.

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