Chariots taking me for a ride!

[KnightErrant]

Sorry to be MIA so long,

That's encouraging, Alletun's orcs look much better. GOM is probably on
the right track; if the conversion stuff isn't just plain broken then it probably
is a bad sequence of rotations that isn't apparent to me. Sorry, but I'm
basically a code hacker, still haven't gotten the bigger picture of the whole
3D graphics world in my mind.

Apologies re the plumbing theme, just got a new sprinkler system and my
whole world is now consumed with water problems and fixing the dug up
yard. Fall is coming, the blessed time when the d*** grass stops growing!

[Bwian]

Alletun ... which animation set did you apply your skeleton to? I am wondering if there are animation sets that 'work' and ones that just plain don't! I used the Maceman ones for my Orcs, and had the weapon bones go strange.

I was wondering which ones you used and whether you used the same one when it failed as opposed to when it worked. Might help to pin down an issue.

[Alletun]

Bwian i also used the mace animation. Now that i think of it, for the goblin and for some time with the orc i used a two handed axe animation, which you saw didn't work.

also when the animations suddenly worked i noticed that the weapons (and the shields) floated further out, as far as i remember you also had that problem? and as you did i also fixed it by assigning the weapons to the hand bones. Before, the arms stretched themselves freakishly to still hold onto these floating weapons. perhaps that is what caused the weirdo arms?

[Bwian]

This should help KE with the bug-hunting.

We have basically reached the same result independantly, and have both got most of the animation working fine, but with errors in the weapon bone. We both found the weapon bone had drifted away from where it was supposed to be ..and I think your stretched arms could well have been where the arm was going with the weapon.

We have both got workable models by linking the weapon to the hand bone, not the weapon bone.

Something defintiely goes wonky when you get to the end of the chain of bones!

[Alletun]

Dont know if it's supposed to be like this, but the exportskeleton is case sensitive. Couldn't understand why the cas file called "HR_lance_basepose.CAS" didn't want to convert .. had me scratching my head there for awhile, until i took .CAS down to lowercase .cas. Luckely only a small fraction of all cas files how uppercase letters.

just thought i'd mention it so others dont run into the same problem

[KnightErrant]

Sorry Alletun,

The case problem is probably mine; that is something I can look into.
However, the interesting thing is the bone assignments. Amazing how
something I was so into just a short while ago goes out of the mind.
IIRC I don't think I've ever messed with the weapon/shield bones; they follow
along for the ride. I remember Caliban commenting on how animations get
odd if you do stuff to the weapon bones and also GOM does things differently
with the extra bones in his mesh converter so I never tried to do things with
them. You may have hit on the problem here, assign things to hands but not to
weapon bones?

KE

[GrumpyOldMan]

Hi All

Just spent a week and a half nursing everyone here through flu A, really sick of being Florence Nightingale .

With the floating weapons, have people been modifying the default weapon poses to match the new skeletons? The bone_Rhand and bone_Lhand are placed at the global position of the bones in the skeleton. If the new position of the hand bones is down and in, then the weapons will indeed float away from the bodies if a standard weapon pose is used.

I haven't tried the anim utilities on them yet but it's not too hard to manually alter them with a hex editor like XVI32.

Cheers

GrumpyOldMan