Adventures in fragMOTION

I have recently become very 'attached' to fragMOTION, a robust, lowcost 3D modelling package that concentrates on animation as well as handling other standard shape creation commands; UV unwrapping/mapping, Primitive generation, Object Transformation, and so on. Being very graphically oriented[good gosh, I'm in ShowBusiness afterall{for pay even, lol}!], I've always gravitated towards programs that provide this type of workSpace and workFlow. My purchasing gameSpace, albeit with it's frustrating animation system, was because of it's layout and workflow and I enjoy working the program from a 'flow' standpoint. Borks not withstanding...

To this same end, I've stayed far away from programs that I consider to be a 'programmer's' commandLine toolBox rather than a graphically 'intuitive' INTERFACE[kinda thought the name says it all...]. In my opinion, programs like Blender fall into this category, and for this reason, I never really evalutated it's performance. Now, I'm not stating that program Such-n-Such is worse than any other, I'm merely expressing my perspective and experience from a graphic standpoint. This isn't about Blender...or gameSpace. It's about how dang cool, fragMOTION is, to me at least.

Let me give a few examples of why I think fragMO is so neat to work with.

One of the best thought out features of the ShowToolPro is the ability to mount image to object in the viewer to judge node placement in objects for Weapon/Item prototyping. It helps out so much and is possible[without some neato buttons/dialog] inside gameSpace with it's superb Axis adjustment toolset and object manipulation features. World Coordinate Info is output to a small everpresent dialog, love that box. It doesn't act exactly like ShowToolPro, but close enough for engineering[mathematicians need not apply...;)].

fragMOTION has almost the exact same lightweight Image caching system to allow for 'Attachments' to be made to any Bone object. I was very excited to learn this feature existed and immediately ventured forth to investigate. Yes, indeed; it did mount any specified object, but at the Object's Origin, nowhere else. What to do , what to do. What I thought best was to post at the Forum's at Fragmosoft, the author is always very present and updating the core in a respectible fashion. And guess what? After I explained the Torque schema of 'mounting' and 'nodes' and provided some examples of 'proper' alignment node-node; the author privately emailed me with an executable .DLL file and an .XML file that totally mimics the 'torquish' method of mounting. Oh, did I forget to mention the ability to custom render this Image[wire/flat/shaded/textured], too? How cool is that, object specific rendering...well, gS does it pretty well too. I can now specify which node to make the 'Origin' for attachment. Truely amazing, the author popped this out to a 'newbie'.

Next example of ultraCoolness[coders pay attention!]:

So, for quick prototyping and animating a 'meshed' rig; I utilize "BoxyBoy" my generice box humanoid based upon the stock Kork interior structure/hitboxes/weighting envelopes. I know him pretty well; yeah, he's boxy, but he's my boy... After dragging my shape thru UltimateUnwrap and bringing it into the fragMOTION environment, I notice a huge FaceCount difference on the total shape. Something was amiss, I needed to check things out. Now, in stock fragMOTION, there is a way to check the selected grouping face/vertex count. It involved highlighting my Grouping, then navigating to another portion of the ShapeTree to highlight the entire Mesh object, which would set the value in the appropriate field of the Mesh object, not the Grouping object. Too bad. What to do, what to do? Once again; ask the 'experts' for advice. I posted this as a new Feature request and got way more than I expected.

As stated before, I stay away from 'scripting' as much as possible[well, not in TGE, it's a necessity], as this is not my forte. fragMOTION allows for LUA scripting to extend the core Classes and yadda, yadda, ya lose me after that. Don't read LUA, don't speak LUA, isn't LUA a Hawaiian beach party? LOL. Island brothers, please, no offense intended... When I asked about this process, the author took me through a step by step outline to doing what I had asked!! What, Rex coding his own UI?? Call the authorities at once, have this activity stopped. Through the wonderful graphically driven Drag/Drop in the ShapeTree and a small LUA script snippet provided by fragMO, I added this feature to my UI permanently. My main point here is to codingHeavy developers needing a GOOD lowcost modelling/animation package, fragMOTION should have a serious looking at. With some good LUA scripting skills, many things could become possible in the fragMOTION environment.

At present, there is no DTS/DSQ format exporter, although the author has stated it's an intended feature for a future update. No matter, since there is a strong handshake between fragMOTION and Milkshape3D, so any exporting can be accomplished in that pipeline.

Well...that's my first two adventures in fragMOTION; stay tuned for future adventures in fragMOTIONing....I'll keep trying to find out more how it can be used for good leverage.


oh, btw: at present, I've asked the author to allow me to post these small scripts[executable may be a different story...], as tools for other developers utilizing fragMOTION in their art asset pipeline, I'll keep you informed.