Hey guys! Thought I'd try animations after all and actually got pretty far this time before running into a problem. So I'm working on this Scanner Pylon with spinning little fins on the mast. The animation is enveloped to the two bones mid and top, looks fine when I play it in XSI. Been bouncing back and forth between FragMe and Sereja's door animation guide to get the idea of how the exporting and munging goes.
(https://www.swbfgamers.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi905.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fac254%2FEpifire%2FModding%2520Questions%2520Pics%2FScreen%2520Shot%252004-19-15%2520at%252009.10%2520PM_zps3vkwexbq.png%7Eoriginal&hash=581be15b27217a8bca94ca1c2120e50e8c0fa91b)
Getting this error in the console when I try and munge, so while I go and try to figure out what I did wrong I figured I'd also go and ask around.
WARNING: While correcting joint base pose matrices, no skin was found!
WARNING: Bone <bone_mid>may be a floating bone
ERROR: No Skin model in MSH?
After that it ZenAsset.exe crashes immediately thereafter. I think part of the problem may be in my bone hierarchy (as I mostly followed the FragMe tutorial). One difference in the tools I use vs the old method, is I usually don't make a dummyroot parent null by default, (since the Andewedget tools make one on export). I could be wrong but I've never had to actually use a dummyroot until this animation stuff, so that may be the problem.
Secondly I'm not sure if "Current frame as base pose" was supposed to still be checked on the second animation export (NOT the first basepose that's squished to frame 1).
Thirdly I moved the actual animation bones into position around the model (without freezing their transforms). Are bones supposed to be zeroed out on the x,y,z axis, or do they need to retain their positional data for the animation to work?
Just trying to fish around to figure out what I'm doing wrong, cause if I can nail this down I may be able to make some other animations much quicker for future work in BF1 maps.
It's been to long since I've read any of the tutorials, but if I remember right, the bone root should have some geometry with uv applied (I think sereja uses a cube in his tutorial for making a door). -- It looks like it's just a null you are using for bone_root. I don't know if that would cause such a huge problem though..
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Edit, I think it's fine for the model to have bones that are just nulls, but I think the animation MSH has to have the bone_root (and/or dummyroot) as some small (hidden flagged) geometry, instead of an empty mesh.
Quote from: -RepubliqueCmdr- on April 20, 2015, 12:25:59 PM
It's been to long since I've read any of the tutorials, but if I remember right, the bone root should have some geometry with uv applied (I think sereja uses a cube in his tutorial for making a door). -- It looks like it's just a null you are using for bone_root. I don't know if that would cause such a huge problem though..
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Edit, I think it's fine for the model to have bones that are just nulls, but I think the animation MSH has to have the bone_root (and/or dummyroot) as some small (hidden flagged) geometry, instead of an empty mesh.
Hmm, I may try and use the cube method. Does this cube/mesh need to be visible, or in this method can I hide it? Otherwise I'll just use that in replacement of the dummyroot. Ordinarily I don't even use a dummyroot, since everything is contained under the main mesh I use (and that's always worked fine).
At first when it said no skin model I thought it meant it couldn't find the envelope data. But if it's just this cube thing, that'd be a relief.
I saw a lot of stock models that didn't include a dummyroot (mostly props). I don't believe dummyroot does anything specific for the compilers, just another way to organize things.
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Yes, you can hide it just like any other geometry. I think the thing is just that the geometry needs to exist.
* Here is to hoping it's just the compilers being picky *
Quote from: -RepubliqueCmdr- on April 21, 2015, 10:25:55 AM
I saw a lot of stock models that didn't include a dummyroot (mostly props). I don't believe dummyroot does anything specific for the compilers, just another way to organize things.
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Yes, you can hide it just like any other geometry. I think the thing is just that the geometry needs to exist.
* Here is to hoping it's just the compilers being picky *
Awesome that got it past the munge! Almost there, right now it plays halfway but stops while doing this odd jiggle. I did run 60 frames for the main animation (not sure if SWBF can do over 30) but I also want to loop it. My ODF is a little odd atm, as I'm trying to reference the carbon freezing chamber but it's set on an idle cycle rather than a loop. I wish I knew what all the ODF commands were for animations right now.
Try looking at jabba's torture droid. I think that one might be looped.
So close! I actually took a look at the torture droid ODF and it was way simpler than I was thinking. Apparently no extra lines are needed to make it loop.
I just have this weird jiggle problem, otherwise it's all mint...
http://social.xfire.com/videos/634908
In XSI it looks and plays just fine, but I just wanna know what might be causing this. Once I can nail that down, this should be a piece of cake to roll out more animations in the future.