It only gives the object name message - there is no message associated with animations. The proof is if a file appears… which it now appears to be doing. What name are you calling the original egg? It should be in the same form as it selects by default, i.e. path/wibble.egg The animations in multifile mode will then be given filenames such as ‘path/wibble-ani_name.egg’ anim.egg suggests its not taking that form and that maybe your giving Chicken an .egg file name it doesn’t like.
P.S. Tried it on my XP system with the same software versions… worked fine.
I have spent some time testing the exported files in panda and I have come across a few problems.
First: if you remember, in my file I had two bones controlling the top and bottom faces of a box. The animation that was exported, when rendered in panda, only changes position relative to the origin. It does not have any transformations in shape, which I animated very obviously in blender. Although the export-char-simple-strike.egg seams to be transforming in position and scale.
Second: Chicken did not export any textures. Both my cube and the dummy object from export-char-simple.blend appear white and with any shading or textures in panda.
Well, what I will say is as long as the animation is bone based with weights and plays back in blender in the time range of the animation in Chicken it normally works. I would examine files that do work and try and work out how they differ - its hard for me to guess the problem from that info. You can always send me the file so I can have a look if you can’t figure it out, but you’ll learn more working it out yourself! Well, probably.
As for the second problem, that is is probably because the default render mode in pview is, well, white - try hitting ‘l’ to switch on lights. (Also remember that ‘p’ switches on per pixel lighting - needed to see normal maps.) The test character appears white until you do that.
Do note that, whilst in need of a good update, Chicken does have a manual that contains a lot of info that you will find useful. If your still having texturing issues have a look in there - it describes what works and what doesn’t. Key point is that textures have to be actual images rather than procedural and UV mapped. If panda can’t find or load the texture due to getting the path wrong (i.e. moving stuff around, forgetting to use relative paths.) then you will get white btw.
Well, its that time again - a new release of Chicken is now available on the sourceforge site. The new features are as follows:
Fixes to package creation - it was duplicating a file in the archive and storing some it shouldn’t, so its now smaller!
Single file animation export is now the default.
Objects that would typically be exported that are tagged with ‘ForceEmpty’ will now be exported as empties. (For stand-in meshes when making a level.)
Integration of eggoctree tool running from Chicken. (For level geometry.)
Introduction of chicken_install.txt
Update of manual, so it mentions most new features and does not give the wrong impression anywhere. More work still needed however.
I’m not sure what people will make of the fact it now exports animations to a single file with the mesh by default - I did ask earlier in this thread but nobody ever gave any feedback, and as I think this is better for newbies I’m going ahead with it anyway. If anyone has any strong objections its easy enough to revert.
I am hopping that the updates to the manual will reduce the number of questions received - it now covers most of the new features, and I’ve also put in some mention of how you can use Blender as a level editor with Chicken. (The ForceEmpty and eggoctree updates are both for level editing.) There is also now a file explaining how to install it, right where you will see it on opening the archive.
There is a potential problem with windows octree support, specifically that I have not tested it - my Windows machine is currently dead due to a failed power brick, so I can’t. If someone can test it and tell me what happens I would like to know - I had to play guess the code;-)
I have a request; support for blender’s texture stencils. Would be incredibly useful for multitexturing.
I guess mapping to panda’s CMInterpolate combine mode would work.
If you simply don’t have time I can see if I can do it myself, ATM I don’t have time to look into it so that would be once I get 1.6 out the door.
Assuming the Blender python interface allows access to that data it should be relatively easy to add that feature - a few lines of code, though more to consider all cases. I’ve added it to my todo list, not sure when I’ll get around to it though - feel free to get there first;-)
Dam, and I thought I made a good guess;-) Oh well, unless someone can give me a patch to fix it there is not much I can do right now. New power brick should arrive some time this week though, and I spotted a bug/misfeature that needs fixing yesterday anyway, so expect a bug fix release shortly.
My laptop is back alive and I’ve already fixed it actually (I just assumed, not having a windows install to check it on, that ppython was in Panda’s bin directory, rather than there being a separate python directory.) , except there is a windows specific bug with the octree script. Well, I think its just an issue with strange paths, but didn’t have time yesterday to get my teeth into it. About to go to bed and busy all of tomorrow I’m afraid, but will fix it on Saturday, hangover permiting, and get a bug fix release out then.
Just stuck up R60 on sourceforge - its just a minor bug release to fix the windows octree issue and an issue with ForceEmpty not interacting correctly with dupligroups. Well, there is also some extra testing stuff in subversion, but that is not part of the release.
Hello, the correct way, as I learned it, to use Blender is to have a model made in your base blend file and then link it in and use a proxy to do animations. That way you can have many animation files but only one model file. Change the model and all the animation files are changed. Great for making movies etc.
What your describing is a workflow suitable for production with lots of people - its entirely about allowing multiple animators to work on animations for one character at the same time. I’m not sure that is really needed for games, as each character has a set of pre-canned animations that are reused many times, rather than films where there are some canned animations and many custom animations for specific scenes. Most games, even professional, have all animations for a character made by one person.
If the fix is simple I’m happy to do it, but I don’t see much advantage in having that capability, and don’t even know how to setup a test scene, let alone what the problem could be. Chicken can already achieve something like this anyway - with separate animation files an animation can be applied to any object with an identical skeleton, so you could copy the file and edit the animations whilst continuing to model the original mesh. Or indeed produce an entirely new mesh on the same skeleton and have multiple characters sharing the same animations as long as they have the same skeletons. Or split a character into chunks modeled separately to allow things like armour choice etc.
Sorry if that is not the answer you were hoping for, but unless there is an argument I’ve missed I see no need for this.
Whenever I try to export with Chicken a second time, I get the following error. Restarting Blender and loading a saved .blend doesn’t clear it either.
Compiled with Python version 2.5.2.
Checking for installed Python... got it!
Settings for export not found. Using defaults
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
File "F:\Blender\.blender\scripts\chicken_exportR60.py", line 1587, in <module
>
exporter = Gui()
File "F:\Blender\.blender\scripts\chicken_exportR60.py", line 537, in __init__
self.init()
File "F:\Blender\.blender\scripts\chicken_exportR60.py", line 166, in init
self.pview, self.egg2bam, self.optchar, self.octree = d['tools']
ValueError: need more than 3 values to unpack
Ok, just had a quick look and its the settings file/memorisation system - I missed a bit when adding the octree setting to it. Additionally, if you have an old settings file then that will need deleting - if you do try that, otherwise you could revert to the version before, which should be fine. I should be able to find the time to fix it tonight (My time - GMT+1).
Just uploaded R61 to sourceforge - this only fixes araneldon’s issue and adds some code to give better warnings if people install it incorrectly. Well, I think I got the issue, but the description and the bug I found don’t quite match. Anyway, if you already have a working copy this new release adds nothing, but everyone else feel free to download!
