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Messages - raychaser

Pages: [1] 2
1
Won't implement / Complex Sprite 3D textures
« on: October 23, 2007, 11:02:14 PM »
Just throwing in my request from another forum thread.

Let me sell this a bit: It would kick some serious butt to be able to control complex sprites as textures. Imagine: eyes, eyebrows, mouths, hell even hair on different subframes that have their animations and scripts controlling their positions etc. Change a character's tie, shirt, socks, shoes on the fly without having to re-render the entire texture. put a gaping wound or bullet hole on your character on the fly. Animate a flowing wound, tears, snow accumulating in hair etc. Every minute I spend thinking about this yields more possibilities of what we could do with it.

What I need it for specifically: Face Engine

You could do things like:
actor.mood("Happy");

mood() could be a user-defined method that would control the eyes, eyebrows, mouth etc in different ways. You could easily write a function to make the eyes look at things and have the expressions change subtly. Also the footprint would be miniscule because the eye graphic would be less than 4k and you wouldn't need a whole face texture for every eye position.

This might also pave the way to a lip-syncing ability

What is required here is that the transparency and colour be calculated from the sum of all frames and subframes.

eh? eh?

2
Technical forum / Re: blender export animations
« on: October 23, 2007, 03:14:52 PM »
Hi Fireside,

As you asked I've posted my script here: http://forum.dead-code.org/index.php?topic=2440.0

3
Scripts, plugins, utilities, goodies / Blender Export Script...
« on: October 23, 2007, 05:53:52 AM »
...is not ready yet  >:D ... Sorry

Hi folks. I spent all week poking at the blender .x export script. I would be so happy to be the hero and deliver a fully working product to this communty. If only I had another week I know I could crack this, but sadly I've run out of time and I need to get going with my actual project now.

Download the script here:
http://mattreimer.com/a/DirectX8Exporter.zip

It will look like "DirectXM1 (.x)" in the export menu of blender when you unzip this file and drop it into the scripts directory

It does work (kind of) but it will mean two or three extra steps in fragmotion before it works in WME. Why is this good? Well, it means that I can do all the modeling, rigging and animating in blender and only do simple cleanup steps in fragmotion. This is a step in the right direction I think.

Here's what I fixed:
  • Individual actions are now unique and correctly named animations in the .x
  • Material naming problem was fixed so that you can use multiple materials on a single model now. Before both materials would have the same name.
  • Added extra header information (but only the absolutely necessary stuff) into the .x file
  • I set all buttons to their required defaults so when you invoke the script in Blender don't change any of the settings. Just hit "Export All"
 
Problems still:
  • .x file crashes mview and DX SDK viewer unless you open it and export it in Fragmotion. This could be because it's using matrix keys and apparently some weird values for things like keyType which aren't in the DirectX specification but I'm theorizing here. It might be an easy fix, it might not. It's been almost 4 years since I did matrix multiplication so I'm really rusty  ???
  • The skeleton gets exported upside-down and must be mirrored on the y-axis in fragmotion. I'm SURE this is an easy fix but I never figured out where to put the minus sign
  • Empty frames are not exported.  For example if I export an animation with keyframes on frames 1 and 10 then in fragmotion it will show only 2 frames (1 and 2) and leave out the in-between ones. This is very odd because it clearly specifies the frame numbers as 1 and 10 in the .x file.

Now I'm exhausted and on a purely selfish note I have enough to continue my work in blender using fragmotion so I will challenge someone else to pick up the gauntlet and finish this so that we may all use the sheer splendour and magnificence that is Blender3D.

I have high hopes for this thread. Anyone?  ::wave

4
Not a bug / Re: Subframe's not considered in Settexture
« on: October 23, 2007, 12:40:15 AM »
feature request?

It would be amazing to be able to have a layered-up sprite that we could control things like facial features using subframe sprites. For example I could have the eyeballs as one sprite and write a little script to have them shift around and look at things. Eyebrows and mouth could be a different subframe and we could easily build an entire expression engine to do cartoony animation like grim fandango.

The goal:
actor.setExpression("Happy");
actor.setEyes("shifty");

Oh well, for now I suppose I can do it by rendering each eye position for each expression into a separate image and then switching back and forth. That's a lot of images though so I think the sprite would be rather large.

Can anyone think of another way to do this? Has anyone tried this before?

5
Technical forum / Re: blender export animations
« on: October 22, 2007, 09:56:49 PM »
actually Mnemonic, That was a fairly easy fix. The directX exporter for blender can easily support one file containing animations with the same names as the blender actions. What's really got me stumped is why my .x file crashes under mview before I open and save it in fragmotion but not after. I don't have a good setup for the directx SDK so it's been very hard for me to debug it. So far all I get is a crash without any information in both the .X SDK viewer and MVIEW.

Fragmotion must be adding something extra to the file but so far I've mimmicked the header exactly and the coordinates seem the same....

I've been trying to run both .x files through winMerge to see what their differences are but so far no luck. Anyway I'm almost out of tricks so I'll post whatever I have tonight and then maybe someone else can pick up the gauntlet and continue.

6
Technical forum / Re: blender export animations
« on: October 22, 2007, 06:04:35 PM »
hang on fireside. I'm getting through this as fast as my little fingers can type it. Haven't done any 3D math since university though so it's a bit rusty. :)

I've modified the Blender directx export script so that every action becomes an animation and gets properly named. Also added some extra header information and cleaned up some other things like material naming and Bone mirroring.

So why haven't I released it to the community yet? Mainly because it still causes mview to crash. Basically the script is at the point where everything gets set up properly so all you have to do is open it and then immediately save it in fragmotion for it to be usable. If I can't figure it out in the next day I'll just post the script and maybe someone else can take it from there.

In the end I'm willing to accept that extra step of sanitizing it in fragmotion if it means I get to use blender for all the actual work but it's not a perfect solution and other people may not be so willing.

I'll post whatever I've got tomorrow and then we'll see where we are....

7
Not a bug / Subframe's not considered in Settexture
« on: October 21, 2007, 08:28:51 PM »
I'm having a problem whereby only the base frame shows up when I use a sprite as a texture using SetTexture. Is this a bug? It would be great to have control of subframes as well as the main frames to do complex dynamic sprite scripting and animation.

Also it seems that only the transparency of the root frame is considered.

My setup: I've got a base frame with a skin texture and then a couple of effect subframes on top. I then use settexture to assign this sprite to a material.

8
Technical forum / Re: blender export no texture
« on: October 17, 2007, 04:59:46 PM »
Hi guys,

This is actually a bug with the blender export script. fireside, open your script and scroll down to the material section. I think you'll find that all the materials have the same name

I've got this and a couple of other things fixed already. I'm hopefully going to release a fixed version of this script in the next day or two. I'll post it here when I'm done. In the meantime just give your materials in the .x file different names and that should solve it,

addendum: I should mention that this is only in the case of multiple textures mapped to a single mesh. In any case if you again open the .x file and scroll down to the materials section you should see the filename for the texture. Just make sure it points to the right place and that the file exists. Remember that if there is no "c:\*****\****" in front of it and it is only "image.jpg" then the image needs to be in the same folder as the .x file (of course you probably already knew that but I mention it for completeness)

9
Won't fix / Re: DirectX importing problem
« on: October 15, 2007, 04:37:07 PM »
Ok, I never figured it out but instead I spent a whole weekend and managed to get Blender animations to export (!!!! ::rock)

I'm writing up a short guide for those who are interested. I'll try to post it some time this week. Nothing revolutionary or new, just a very specific set of steps you need to follow. Also I'm starting to work on the .x export script that comes with Blender so that there are less cleanup steps. Of course I'll post that too if I get it working.

So this means all my mac-y and linux-y development cohorts can now start work again.... even if they won't be able to play the game.   ;) and I can use blender which is 1. Free 2. Awesome 3. Did I say awesome?

10
Won't fix / Re: DirectX importing problem
« on: October 13, 2007, 08:38:47 PM »
Thanks Mnemonic and sorry about the broken links. I lost the second file somewhere.

Incidentally the second picture is here:
http://mattreimer.com/a/WME2.JPG

When I try without matrix keys the distortion is HUGE!! I'm not really concerned with the fact that the lungs are distorted so much as the distortion of the rest of the model. I mean, look at that head!!! It's huge  :P

What I'm really curious about though is why the WME rendering is distorted compared to the DirectX viewer.

What would cause this?


11
Won't fix / DirectX importing problem
« on: October 13, 2007, 05:10:20 AM »
I am using Fragmotion to model 3D characters. Sometimes when I import them into WME I get strange results. I believe this has been covered a few times here in the forums but there has never been a really satisfactory answer that I have found. I've spent some time collecting evidence and I believe the problem lies within WME.

Here are some examples. These are two ways of exporting using FragMotion
http://www.mattreimer.com/a/WME1.jpg
http://www.mattreimer.com/a/WME2.jpg

The animation that is being played when this effect happens (you may be able to guess) is a breathing animation where the breathing bone scales (no rotation, no location shift). I can email someone the .x file but I'd rather not post it on the net.

For a minute if we ignore that fragmotion completely screws up the second case the important thing is that WME displays the model differently than the MS DirectX Viewers. It seems to me as if this would be a fairly simple fix of maybe not reading coordinates from the .x file in the right order or perhaps a wrong scaling factor. The animation looks right, it just seems to be scaled in the x and z direction by a factor of 2 or 3.

Please let me know if/how I can provide more information. What do you need?

12
Technical forum / Re: Direct X model facing wrong way
« on: October 13, 2007, 04:46:53 AM »
Looks like I answered too quickly. Seems like I am getting some distortion in WME import that I am not getting in the directx viewers I have. I will file a bug report on this one shortly.

13
Technical forum / Re: Direct X model facing wrong way
« on: October 11, 2007, 07:16:01 PM »
Sorry if this sounds obvious but I solved this problem by just modeling and animating things backwards. The first thing I do when importing into fragmotion is to rotate the mesh 180 degrees on the vertical axis. Then I animate it as I normally would. This seems to solve the problem and all I need to remember is that back=front when I'm switching views in Fragmotion.

If only exporting from blender was as easy.... I spent a good 10 hours trying to get bones and animations out of it with 4 different .x exporters. No love. Fragmotion seems to be the next best thing though  :-\

14
Technical forum / Object referencing
« on: August 16, 2007, 05:15:40 PM »
Having trouble phrasing my question. Maybe I'll give an example.

An script I have gets passed a string which corresponds to the name of an actor in a particular scene. This may be the main actor or an NPC. I want to take that string and from it find the actor's X and Y coordinates. Sounds simple...

As I see it this involves two problems:
  • How do I reference an actor object given only a string corresponding to the object name? I believe standard javascript can do something like this[str] or document[str] but I'm not sure if that is possible here.
  • Is it possible to find actors based on the scene that they are in like scene[actor] or something? The reason I ask is that each scene will have different actors and I don't want to have to declare ALL of them as global variables in every script or in global.inc since there will likely be a lot of them and keeping track of them in multiple places is a pain. The NPCs will be defined in scene_init.script for each scene but the function I'm trying to use is located in the root scripts location.

Does this make any sense?

15
Technical forum / Special Characters (especially TAB)
« on: August 12, 2007, 02:38:25 AM »
Hi,

I've had to put some further parameters into the strings.tab file and I have used tab delineation since it's already set up that way.

It works so far and when I pull the string:
NAME<tab>param1<tab>param2<tab>Text

from the file I get:
param1<tab>param2<tab>Text

so now all I need to do is split this string by the TAB key and VOILA!!

I'm using the javascript special characters myStr.Split("\t"); but that's not working.  Could it be that WME uses different special characters?

Also is there a place I could find a list of all the other special characters? Carriage returns etc?  I searched around in the help files and the forums but didn't find anything

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