Preview: SWB mesh tools (part 1)

Sytner

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The activity on this thread gave me the boost to resurrect this project and I managed to fix the rotation bug. I think it looks good now:


This gives me some heart to actually continue at last... :)
 
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Sytner

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Carried on working on it over the weekend, was (finally) able to export a mesh/skeleton/animation to FBX, edit the animation (badly) and reimport to SWG:


 
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DAK

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Dude, beautiful work. I personally, have no need to re-import to SWG for the time being (until ProjectSWG gets to the point of adding new content) right now its more for my own side project; but however you want to release it is up to you.
I was having no luck getting the command-line FBX exporter to compile, and the compiled version I was able to get my hands on, crashes in every way. So this is my only hope here... (For a faster, less tedious method of exporting, I should say)
 
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Rabiator

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was the skeleton-importer https://modthegalaxy.com/index.php?resources/skeleton-importer-for-3ds-max.44/ any help ?
How you solve the problem that swg has 3 kind of rotations while 3DS only have 2 during the export ? (3DS can import all 3 rotation but combine them then)
That way you may get weird animations when the skeleton use the 3rd kind of rotation.

Like the bug "ultimate 3D" has with the 3rd rotation. (the right food)
unknownKLC28UTQ.png
 

Sytner

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was the skeleton-importer https://modthegalaxy.com/index.php?resources/skeleton-importer-for-3ds-max.44/ any help ?
How you solve the problem that swg has 3 kind of rotations while 3DS only have 2 during the export ? (3DS can import all 3 rotation but combine them then)
That way you may get weird animations when the skeleton use the 3rd kind of rotation.

Like the bug "ultimate 3D" has with the 3rd rotation. (the right food)
View attachment 557
I've not looked at that tool because I've had the skeleton part working for a long time now - not sure it would've helped much anyway since it's a max script vs FBX SDK code.

The FBX SDK supports all of the rotations. It also works to bake into a single rotation and apply the inverse transform upon import. I still need to test out importing an entirely novel model with the latter method though - so far I have only been creating new animations for existing skeletons.
 

DAK

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was the skeleton-importer https://modthegalaxy.com/index.php?resources/skeleton-importer-for-3ds-max.44/ any help ?
How you solve the problem that swg has 3 kind of rotations while 3DS only have 2 during the export ? (3DS can import all 3 rotation but combine them then)
That way you may get weird animations when the skeleton use the 3rd kind of rotation.

Like the bug "ultimate 3D" has with the 3rd rotation. (the right food)
View attachment 557
It was a major help, while my old PC was running - a thunderstorm blew out a transistor on my motherboard (yes I had a surge protector/battery backup and even ARC fault breakers on that power outlet).

So I recently upgraded and unfortunately my old 3DS Max installation from college doesn't want to start up because the licensing service doesnt work under Window 10.

But for what it's worth I really do appreciate the work you did, there.
I really wanted to move on to Blender, but I think I might have to just get a newer copy of 3DS MAX, since so much of the work I've done is in MAX format, (general familiarity with plugins/scripts I have), and I'll just have to gradually export everything and switch over, when I become more familiar with it.
 

Sytner

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On the topic of Blender, the FBX files I'm generating for some reason do not work with it. I can't figure out why. When I import them it just does nothing - no warnings or errors - just nothing happens.

They work fine however with:

- 3ds Max
- Maya
- Win10 "3D model viewer"

So I can only assume Blender doesn't fully support FBX, or has some strict requirements on it that I'm unaware of.
 

Rabiator

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ah i was unaware af the SDK. I realy did not found in max script any way to export all 3 rotations like maya have. (Rotate, Rotate Axis, Joint Orient)
Maybe you can send a FBX and i can check it in blender?
 

Sytner

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Thanks, appreciate you taking a look - attached below.

As you can see, it's fine in even the Windows viewer (this one has the baked rotation values btw):

1602519673432.png
 

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Sytner

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Thanks, interesting that you get a message - that's something to go on at least. Maybe I should try updating to the latest to see if I get a message too (using 2.80 currently).
 

Rabiator

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tried to send it through FBX converter
get this "Call to FbxImporter::Import() failed. Error: File is corrupted"
 

Sytner

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It did help - thanks! Turns out that Blender does not like the bone hierarchy being a child of the mesh node, I changed it to be a child of the scene root node instead and it works:

blender1.gif

The bones look strange despite it obviously being functionally correct (fine in other software again). Perhaps I can make some more improvements there.
 

Sytner

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Some pretty significant progress the last few weeks, entirely new animated model import via FBX:

 
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