Hello,
I wold like to purchase models off of 3drt.com to use in Panda3d. After many months of searching for an appropriate engine I have found this one because of it’s commercial backing, power, and ease of use. However, the one unintuitive “feature” of the engine is sole .egg support. (Please tell me why this really is intuitive). So after some work, it is quite easy to get static models into the egg format using the supplied converter or Blender. However for an animated model I fave found no viable solution. The animation “jumps” rapidly. I read that this is because .x uses keyframes and whatnot. So (finally) 3drt provides a free sample model to test with your engines (Thank Goodness) anyone have any ideas on how to get http://www.3drt.com/3dm/free/3drt.com-free-monster-animated-character.zip that into the Panda3d engine? Or for that matter any animated .x model? Thanks!
P.S. Yes I know how to use the supplied converter
Thanks again!
hm. pviewing the .x file works quite fine (except textures arent loaded for some reason.
it also includes a mb file which can be converted into an egg.
same with the max file.
additionally it contains a ms3d file. ms3d is comparebly cheap (only a few $) and can write to X file and propably dae files too.
anyway. have you tried to simply load the .x files with panda? they should work even without converting before.
Very impressive how fast the response was! I had loaded the model into Panda3d and the model appeared to Jump or SKip from one key frame to another. After testing some more, I found that even in the official DXviewer the model did this so it may not be Panda…
P.S. Thanks for you help, Again a great first impression with speedy response!
Don’t forget that by default, Panda won’t interpolate frames.
I had this same problem when I first started researching using prior art assets I made for another game engine. I normally use Lightwave, and since there is no direct path for animated Lightwave scenes into Panda’s egg format, I chose the DirectX X format as a “quick start” path.
The reason for this is that I’ve used DirectX X before with other projects, including my own D3D engine, so I’m pretty comfortable with the format. I already had models rigged with animations that I could test in Panda. Initially, they looked “jumpy” too like that, and I did more research.
I found out that by default, Panda will not interpolate keyframes. The last engine I used interpolated keyframes in an animation by default.
In the manual, you can find a section on this, but the meat of what you want is this setting for your Actor:
actor.setBlend(frameBlend = True)
I hope this solves it for you!
That Piece of Code should be BLATANTLY displayed in the manual, works like a dream. Thank You!