how to do sortof mesh animation with blender and chicken?

General Discussion
1

Hi,

in the context of developing a game with panda3d, I’m making actors in blender and export them with chicken.
I have a mesh that has some bone animations, which work perfectly fine in panda3d, that needs also a special vertex animation. I tried to simulate to vertex animation with bones, but the bones are interfering with the others animations. Using shape key would be the way in blender, but if they’re not exported, it’s useless.
What would be the approach to solve this problem? Having two actors? that would be annoying to manage.

Thanks.

2

either wait for blender 2.51 and the hopefully new chicken exporter which hopefully will have better shapeky support till then.
or you stick with the bones. they do work for stuff like facial animations. they are just a bit tricky to set up. weightpainting is critical. but possible. there where a few threads about this in the past.

3

So you want to control the exported shape keys in panda3d python script ?

4

Thank you for your answer, ThomasEgi. It seems that I had to figure out a way with more bones. It was 2 at the beginning, and now there are 10 bones.

clcheung, it is true that having shape keys exported as vertex animation would be great. Just too bad that I’m still not at the level in blender API to try to implement it.