I meant to contact me by email with your email address - posting your email on the board probably isn`t a good idea. If you weren`t
aware, theres buttons at the end of each persons post, if a person wants one they can have an email button(see bottom of my post) by
altering their profile. Only members logged in to the forum can get at it then. If you did know nvm - soz!
My email service has been down the last 12 hrs so I`ll post on here instead
Your nearly there, but I have a change to what I said about there seeming to be a rule with bones, weights and dbp imports. It would
seem that you may get away with leaving vertices unpainted but only after they have been painted once before and then removed - I think blender needs this "once over" paint thing to update data for export with data held internally that the runtime environment deals with automatically. On your mesh, I rigged and painted it only to find at the end that 3 rogue vertices were showing up in dbp. I then cleared each limbs verts of weight values and applied a face to each bone by repainting. The rogue vertices showed up in dbp still! I guessed the rough location of the polygons connected to these verts(in the end there were 4 polygons), then removed and recreated them.(in edit mode select vertices in clockwise order with the camera directly looking at the target face and theres an option in the menu under "faces" to create a face). Works good as a fix but it does suggest that those verts got locked from the end users control, with regards to weight painting only. I do remember at the start I accidently assigned weights without parenting the mesh to the armature first, so when I realised I reduced the paint value to 0 and went back over them. Obviously I mustn`t have got 3 of them!
Quote: "I noticed you snapped the cursor to object center for start.
then space add armature.
Turned off envelopes.
vertex groups is on
b bone rest is on
deleted camera and lamp"
Yeah sorry I never mentioned that, but what do you mean by "b bone rest is on"?
Although vertex groups is on here, when parenting I never choose to create vertex groups, as sometimes when working I may have to clear parents somewhere and want to keep the current groups. The tab I think must be on no matter what, it ensures auto creation of a group and assigns the group name to the bone of the armature currently being painted, if a group isn`t already assigned to that bone. When I refered to the way you create & use them, I assumed it wasn`t the same way I do it as you have many unpainted verts in your projects that export succesfully. This now leaves me to believe your way will prevent exports/imports from crashing as the data for export is the same as the runtime data(basically its like initailising data for export process). The downside is that there is a higher risk of losing access to vertex weights. Before you ask, yes I`ve tried clearing the mesh of weights, after clearing them from bone weights and clearing the parenting.
One thing I forgot about x mirror. You can leave it on, even for export, but to get two bones to extrude using it, you need to hold shift down and press "e", just pressing "e" is for one bone extrusion. Be carefull to only extrude from the tip though, if you had selected the middle part of the bone to extrude using shift and "e" then you will get 4 bones, 2 mirrrored at the tip and two mirrored at the base! Its also worth noting that most of the time right click during a modification throughout blender usually cancels the action you had just taken. Therefore, if you accidentally extrude a bone and ant to start again, you MUST press the delete key after canceling the current action to get rid of the unwanted extrusion. Right clicking only cancels the positioning of the tip, it doesn`t remove the bone.
Attached is your project file rigged and weight painted. I haven`t blended any of the weights in this, basically you need to animate it now and decide where best to blend weights after the basic animation of the bones are in place. You can play the animation in weight paint mode so it makes for ease of editing. Theres another one there with animation, but yo can see why extra vertices are needed and maybe a better skeleton. Once your happy you have a method to do all you need to with blender you should research how best to construct a mesh for bone animation and how best to rig the meshes. I suspect it will mostly be trial and error but there will be known methods.
****I would think getting your hands on a model you know thats been bone animated and works in dbp, and examining its wireframe will help a LOT. You can load the original model into dbp, hide it, create some primitives and place them at the bone locations to get a visual of the structure of the rig you need to build in blender. You also need to save out the mesh from dbp and import it into blender.****
You can find a model suitable for examination from The Game Creator Store as some are free. The one you want is the Ogre(you just use your forum details to login which you need to do to download it - make sure you know where the download is being put)
