Setting Tags through Blender

Scripting Issues
1

How would you setup a Tag in blender so an object can be found by using -


Actor.find("**/backpackformodel");

I know collisions are set up as “ObjectType, barrier”, but how would you create a pointer to an object that will get exported as part of the whole model?

You would think it would be as simple as “Tag, ObjPointerName”, but that’s not the case (I wish).

2

You can do this with “egg-optchar -flag backpackformodel=backpackformodel”. I know you don’t think egg-optchar works, but you can add the -keepall option to make it make no adjustments to your skeleton hierarchy.

David

3 

egg-optchar -d outputDir -flag CharBody=ThePart C:\Model\modelFile.egg C:\Model\anim1.egg C:\Model\anim2.egg

Where exactly should the the -keepall flag go? Beginning…end?

and

do I need to include all animation files as well?

4

Panda’s command-line tools generally follow the Posix convention for arguments, which says that you can put the command-line options (which are introduced with a “-” character) anywhere on the command line, in any order relative to each other, as long as they all precede the first non-option argument (e.g. the first egg file).

With the -keepall option in the mix, it’s no longer strictly necessary to include all of the animation files, but it’s still a good idea if you can manage it.

David

5

I still don’t understand why Egg-OptChar was destroying my Actor’s skeleton. May I ask, who wrote egg-optchar and when?

6

I wrote it, many years ago, as part of the suite of egg-processing tools for Panda. We’ve been using it successfully for many projects since then, and it’s part of the standard processing for all models for projects such as Disney’s Toontown Online and Pirates of the Caribbean Online. There’s no way we could have achieved acceptable performance in those games without egg-optchar (and other tools like egg-palettize as well, but that’s a different topic). In fact, the model exporters from Maya and other programs are written with the assumption that egg-optchar will be eventually run on the resulting egg files; they don’t make an effort themselves to optimize the skeleton hierarchy, but assume that it will be done later.

I don’t know why you were having difficulties using it, but you seemed a bit hostile to suggestions, so I didn’t push it.

David