I´ve manage to export an animation of a panda model walking from .mb to a .egg file.
But when I opened it up in pview, the model is all messed up, like if the skin was teared apart, with bones in totally strange locations.
I mean, the animation is playing, but the model is completely distorted, as the positions and rotations of its bones (or skin) were not being read correctly.
Is there any place where I can find guidelines on how to avoid this?
Like… How to correctly name the joints… Which must be the axis of the bone´s length… Which must be the up axis of the scene etc.
There aren’t any restrictions such as the ones you name as possible examples. In fact, there aren’t any restrictions at all, that I know of.
There must, however, be something unusual about the way you have created the skeleton that is confusing the converter.
One thing you can try to help research this is to convert the model with -a pose and specify a particular frame of animation. Then compare this to -a both and specify the same (single) frame.
If the animations come out different, something is wrong with the converter. If this happens, I might be able to get a clue what’s going on by examining the two egg files–can you post them somewhere I can download them from?
Are you making sure that your model and skeleton have no non-uniform scaling? Ive found that if that is present in any way with an exported object you can get unpredictable results.
Yes.
I´ve freeze all tranform and deleted the history on the model before binding to the skeleton. And I´ve only used rotations in the animation. I´m almost sure of this.
But I haven´t had any time lately to export the model with -a pose and -aboth as you´ve suggested. After all, not only I had to do the export process, but I have to change the Path environment variable (clear the path to maya 6.5) each time I will export something to .egg, and then change it back to as it were after exporting - I don´t know if it will break any of maya 6.5 functionality if I leave it without the path in the env. variable.
Thanks in advance. And hope I can solve this issue. Because I´m intending to learn game making with Panda, mainly because I love Python and the Panda docs and architecture is very straightforward. I intend to follow the tutorials and make some mini-projects (mini games), starting very simple, then building up on complexity. Always with a cartoony look, for the sake of simplicity - and I love the style, after all. Look at this pencil test I´ve done here:
Unfortunately, David injured his elbow badly - metal pins and plates and that sort of thing. So it’s going to be a little while until he can answer tough questions.
Does anyone know where I can find a good doc with all kind of guidelines on best practices for animating and modeling in Maya for Panda?
And other question:
Aren´t the Scene Editor lecture videos online no more?
Or is this that the server hosting them sometimes is down?
Edit:
…
I´ve manage to download the video lectures.
But I´m having a bug with the scenes created using the scene editor. When I try to run them through the command line or open a previous scene in the scene editor, I get an error saying something like “DirectObject is not defined” etc etc.
Is this me or a bug with the scene editor? Looks like the code generated by the scene editor is outdated, maybe, and DirectObject is under a new name now. Is this the problem?
For now, I´m with these 2 bugs:
the animated model being distorted, messed up.
the scene editor doesn´t load the scenes I´ve created.
I´ll keep coming back at the forum to check if there is an answer.
does anyone here on the forums know one thing:
when I animate a model in maya for panda3d, should it be facing the maya´s positive z or the negative z (into the screen)?
I didn´t get it. Or must it be facing the positive y?
Edit:
And about the bug with the animated panda… I´ve solved it. It was probably related to the nurbs circles shape nodes I´ve parented under the joints transform nodes. Because I´ve deleted them and the Panda is ok now.
I believe that the axis alignment may be dependent upon the modeling package you are using. The egg file format has some syntax to allow for the axes representation to change; different modeling packages have different notions of which axis is up, so if I recall correctly the *2egg programs try to match the package’s up to Panda’s up.
Probably the easiest way to figure this out for a specific model is to load the simple 3-axis model that can be found in Panda’s “models” directory. Then you can check other objects against that model.
It’s true that not every modeling package uses the same coordinate system as panda, but Max and Maya both do.
When you use panda’s “lookAt” function, the +Y axis of the model will be pointed in the specified direction. So it would make sense for the model to be facing toward +Y.
Thanks for the replies.
mtomczak, thanks for the tip about the axis model.
For what I´ve understand, the only difference between maya and panda regarding the axes is that the Y axis of panda is the Z axis of maya. But looks like this doesn´t affect the exported models at all (they get converted properly by the maya2egg). Is this correct?
I´ve tested some 10 different models now and they´re all ok, including the animated ones.
Now the only problem is with the scenes saved in the scene editor not opening when I try to load them.
