cmbasnett
Animation not working
We're looking to get animation support working with this plugin. So far it loads models from the game No One Lives Forever however it does not import/export animations very well. We are suspecting it doesn't have anything to do with the model format itself but rather our implementation in Blender.
We just need to figure out the matrix transformation steps and coordinate system translation. I can supply a model for testing purposes if necessary.
I'd love to work on this! I just need the model to test with it and I'll pull request if I can fix it!
Hi @jsking! Glad to hear you're going to take a crack at this. I've documented the model format here. Feel free to ask either of us if you run into a problem.
So I've taken a look at the animations and I'm guessing every single bone is disconnected from each other in the original game engine, as well as having a global rotation. Do you have any specifics on how Lithtech used those quaternions for bone rotations?
Nothing in particular other than the somewhat out-of-sync documentation I was working off of, which is actually for an older version of the ABC format. (https://web.archive.org/web/20080605043638/http://bop-mod.com:80/download/docs/ABC-Format-v6.html).
I had a suspicion that the way I was constructing the bones (connected rather than disconnected) might have been the reason that the animations seemed to be completely bonkers when I applied the bone rotations. It might be instructive to be able to view the models inside of the ModelEdit program, since that cleared up a lot of questions I had. @ReindeerFloatilla will post the SDK files for you to have a look.
we also ran modeledit through a debugger which helped us a lot with figuring out how it all worked
I've been working on this for several days and I still can't find how to debug windows programs. I'm using Linux, so I have to use WINE to run ModelEdit.
I used IDA (Interactive Disassembler) as well as OllyDbg. However, these really didn't help me all that much to be honest. Most of what I learned was through mucking around with the model settings in Model Edit and viewing the subsequent changes in the file being saved.
On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 9:44 AM jsking [email protected] wrote:
I've been working on this for several days and I still can't find how to debug windows programs. I'm using Linux, so I have to use WINE to run ModelEdit.
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Ah okay then. How do you open the raw file? I tried text editors and they didn't like the file. Is it a special encoding?
On Windows I use a program called HXD but there are lots of equivalent programs for Unix systems (eg. http://www.wxhexeditor.org/).
On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM jsking [email protected] wrote:
Ah okay then. How do you open the raw file? I tried text editors and they didn't like the file. Is it a special encoding?
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I'm working in something similar but for the noesis instead, to export Aliens vs. Predator 2 models. Your informations was actually useful, thank you. For now I've nothing more than model meshes and its bones, I'm stuck in figure out how export the animations as you, so to say. If I do it, I'll share the solution with you, but until then... do you have any news?
Besides, this .lta (converted .abc model) may help you, since it can be open in simple text editor. https://mega.nz/#!iYtRlQYR!00DhYMZ0QValf95v1MTMI3bsmEwlQ7xB4gbXspJSVOs
Unfortunately no there isn't any updates. Making any sort of .abc plugin regardless of Blender or Noesis would be extremely great.
AVP2 used the same version of .abc as No One Lives Forever. And we discovered that the format was just added onto the Lithtech 1.0 version of the format. So it would theoretically be possible to also get it to work with Blood 2 and Shogo.
We mostly talk on Discord. If you wanna chat there it'd be great.
Yes, would be. My main purpose it's AVP but I'm almost sure there are people interested in the other games you cited.
Yes please, can you inform invite link? Or add me there, CrazY.#5317
WIP PR is here https://github.com/cmbasnett/io_scene_abc/pull/2
If anyone has any ideas on the bone twisting rotations, I'd be happy to hear!
Oh just realized my WIP PR was merged.
Just a heads up, while it does import animations (not well), I haven't tested exporting on blender 2.80 🤔
I've played around with different ways of applying the animations and I haven't had any luck on that front.