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Plan for Jeff Gran

Name:	Jeff Gran
Date Posted:	Jul 25, 2005
Rating:	5.0 out of 5
Public:	YES
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Torque Skeleton for Blender alpha v. 0.1

Check it out.

Step 1:

Step 2:

:)

It's far from done - right now it just makes the bones. The arms and hands creation parts are not done yet. And the hardest part is ahead: creating the control structure. I'm afraid that some of the functionality from the other versions might have to be cut out because "you can't do that in Blender", but I also don't want to overlook alternate ways of doing things that I don't know about because of my inexperience with the program.

Any Blender for Torque experts out there want to help me out and play with this and answer some questions for me?

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FruitBatInShades (Jul 25, 2005 at 18:46 GMT)

I'll test it for you but i'm not into python I'm afraid :(

Frogger (Jul 25, 2005 at 19:16 GMT)

Looks cool, I might try it out here soon.

Joseph Greenawalt (Jul 25, 2005 at 19:21 GMT)

Awsome :) Hey, I've got I question for you... Unless I'm mistaken, the idea behind this skeleton generator is to allow people to reuse animations (from say, the rag doll pack) with their own characters by creating a compatible skeleton across modeling apps. Which brings me to my question: I was never able to get the default orc animations to work correctly, even after exactly duplicating the orc skeleton (including node positions to 3 decimal places). I'm pretty sure that the reason for this is that in blender (and in DTS'es exported from blender) the nodes have their local y-axis pointing "down" the bone (towards the next node in the chain). The default animations for the orc were created for a skeleton that has the x-axis pointing down the bone. I tried several different ways to adjust this during the export process, so that I would end up with a skeleton that matches the default anims, with some limited success, but the math needed to do this and maintain the node positions relative to each other is just a bit out of my grasp. So, anyway, have you run up against this problem yet?

Jeff Gran (Jul 25, 2005 at 19:22 GMT)

Cool, if you guys (and/or others) want to test it out and help me get it working right, send me an email at jboy at menlofarms dot net.

edit: Joseph - I saw your threads and remembered that struggle you had, and that's one reason I really want to get this working right. I have forseen that problem and I have an idea on how I may need to solve it. You're right that the axes always point down the bones. In Max and Maya, there is a way to rotate the local axes of the bones without rotating the bones themselves. I'm not sure if there's a way to do that in blender, and looking through the python api, it doesn't look like there's a way to do it in script. The nice thing about my skeleton is that every single bone is aligned with world space, so the math is easy for making the rotations match. What I'm thinking I may have to do is rotate each bone so it is aligned with world space before creating the next bone. I believe this would be "pointing" forwards along the y axis. It would look weird, but I can make the bones really short so you just have a bunch of "ball" shaped bones connected by the dotted lines instead of connecting to the next bone. Any thoughts on that? Definitely send me your email and I'll keep you in the loop on development.
Edited on Jul 25, 2005 19:29 GMT

Joseph Greenawalt (Jul 25, 2005 at 20:06 GMT)

Hey, that might just work :) The only problem that I can forsee is that it might make creating new animations for the skeleton within blender a bit more clunky. I wonder if the blender folks might be persuaded to add the needed features to the api... Guess it couldn't hurt to put in a feature request.

Matthew Langley (Jul 26, 2005 at 16:04 GMT)

Great to see this progress Jeff! With the soldier pack using this skeleton and the upcoming support of the Ragdoll pack integrating this skeleton system with Blender will really give some great support to Indies :)

John Burch (Mar 05, 2006 at 20:53 GMT)

Any word on this for Blender? Guess other things have risen in priority.
Just want to say that we really need this and I, too, would pay money.
John

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