Trapper

Model animations and effects.
User avatar
Ishq
Project Head
Posts: 1145
Joined: Tue Mar 06, 2012 8:32 pm UTC

Re: Trapper rough animation

Post by Ishq »

I guess the only way we can do maya to MD5 is what Velo suggested: Use doom3 to export. Doom3 can export .mb files to MD5.

CKid
Posts: 10
Joined: Thu Jan 17, 2013 4:28 pm UTC

Re: Trapper rough animation

Post by CKid »

ok i'll try that

User avatar
velociostrich
Dragoon
Posts: 318
Joined: Thu Mar 08, 2012 6:24 pm UTC

Re: Trapper rough animation

Post by velociostrich »

First of all, sorry I didn't see this discussion earlier.

CKid wrote:

I think i've found a way to import my maya animation into blender, but i have no idea how to use blender.

[...]

And lastly, most important, will this work? theres no skeletal structure left, but it still moves.

gavlig wrote:

nope, this won't work as far as i can tell. md5 requires armature for animation. I think i will ask about this on blenderartist forums

Gavlig is correct. MD5 requires an armature (aka a "rig" or "bones" or whatever you want to call it). MD3, however, does not; MD2 and MD3 records the position of every vertex for every frame, which was great in the 90s and early 2000s when hardware wasn't powerful enough to deform geometry in real-time, but the trade-off comes in the form of memory to store all that data: several of our "new" models are still MD3s and eat up something like 100+ MB of RAM (ask Fuma; he knows the specifics). Long story short, we don't want to use MD2 or MD3. (Especially not MD2, because iirc that also quantizes vertex positions as a form of compression, which means that they're basically snapped to a grid, so animations don't appear fluid.)

CKid wrote:

So far i've been able to get the objs into blender and it seems like the animation runs, but i did run into a few problems.
Maya operates in Y as up, but right now blender has Z as up, so when i import the obj in the model is rotated 90 degrees up. Is there a way to change that?
The viewport for blender, it seems to be unable to zoom out any further, so i can only see part of the model.

You can scale the model to make it fit in the viewport, and you can just rotate the model to reorient it as long as Maya and Blender use right-hand coordinate systems (which I would imagine that they both do). But that doesn't solve the bigger problem, which is that you've lost the rig by exporting to .obj. (Standard Wavefront .obj format basically only stores vertex and face data; nothing else.)

Ishq wrote:

I guess the only way we can do maya to MD5 is what Velo suggested: Use doom3 to export. Doom3 can export .mb files to MD5.

Provided that nothing else works, then yes, this will probably be the only option. Really, this should probably have been tried first, as I think we know reasonably well that it should work. Also, to clarify, you don't use Doom 3 to export; there's a stand-alone tool distributed with Doom 3's SDK (that I linked to before) that you'd use.

kharnov wrote:

If not, I think CKid mentioned that he had Max. I'm pretty sure Stannum uses Max to animate his models in, and he exports just fine. Can't we use Stannum's export script?

IIRC, uses not an export script but a stand-alone application that can read Max files and export them. (I forget what they are called, but I believe they're freeware and he can give you a copy.) Of course, that would require that you could get your model from Maya into Max, and I don't know how inter-operable they are (though I would imagine now that Autodesk owns both, they're pretty well compatible.) Also, I just checked and katsbits has an exporter listed for Max, though nothing listed for Maya.

If nothing else, I suppose I could learn enough MEL or whatever to write an exporter.

User avatar
Ishq
Project Head
Posts: 1145
Joined: Tue Mar 06, 2012 8:32 pm UTC

Re: Trapper rough animation

Post by Ishq »

Also, to clarify, you don't use Doom 3 to export; there's a stand-alone tool distributed with Doom 3's SDK (that I linked to before) that you'd use.

Nope. That "tool" is actually a dll. You create a .def file that references a series of Autodesk .mb files which contain the mesh and the animations, then, from doom3 you run

Code: Select all

/exportmodels path/to/def
User avatar
velociostrich
Dragoon
Posts: 318
Joined: Thu Mar 08, 2012 6:24 pm UTC

Re: Trapper rough animation

Post by velociostrich »

Nope. That "tool" is actually a dll. You create a .def file that references a series of Autodesk .mb files which contain the mesh and the animations, then, from doom3 you run

Code: Select all

/exportmodels path/to/def

Heh, that's what I get for not looking at it closely. Well, the code is there and Doom 3 is now FOSS so it shouldn't be too bad trying to make it stand-alone.

Post Reply