Blender T3D Soldier

#1 Maybe you should explain what you did to make it work, or where the errors were.
So far I know the transform orientations wrong, you have to correct them again, that's it as I can remember, the big issue were the animations.

#2 Yeah, the animations cannot be imported, there simply is no model when you try to import it but all of the nodes will still show (I think this is just an error between .dae's made in 3DS Max and .dae's made in Blender).

What I did here was import the .dae in Blender 2.68 (current version) and rotated everything 135 degrees from the 'z' axis to fix the transformation orientation issue. From this point, you can go straight to working with the soldier rig as everything else appears to be fine.

I know some people are using older versions of Blender (and don't want to upgrade) and it has issues importing the model altogether, all I've done here is put it in a file format that any version of Blender should recognize and load up correctly.

#3 The issue was there in previous versions, pretty much the same, sometimes different.

#4 Thanks Robert. That'll come in handy, for sure. All I need now is to animate the little bugger..... Or not. :D

#5 Does this export cleanly?

#6 I've tested it in Blender 2.68 and it looks perfectly fine to me:

http://forums.phantomdev.net/download/file.php?id=13
Here's a comparison image between the two, the one on the left is the model file I provided (with some slight edits), the one on the right is the stock T3D soldier.

#7 Oh very cool. I'm going to have to check this out!

#8 Just a heads up, I've finally gotten around to actually fully animating this model, and there were a couple of "aha" tricks waiting for me when I loaded it in.

First off, for some reason my animations are backwards on the "z" axis (need to rotate them all 180 degrees).

Secondly, A good portion of the model is "underground" (below the knees), I think it needs to be moved about 8 units up when you're actually working with it.

If anyone has anything else they've found out about this model, please share, I'd like to get it working!

#9 No real gotchas to report, but I thought I'd mention I'm using it in vlrtt for the players and enemies. I stripped everything out except the lowest-detail level so the whole thing is like 237kB :P.

Just had the usual animation-export challenges with Blender. I'm managing, though, just...

#10 Alright, so the first problem is a little silly. Apparently the "base" model needs to be rotated 180 degrees along the 'z' axis to appear correctly, but animated models need to be facing "forward" in all planes to be correct? That seems kind of odd to me, there might be a little hiccup somewhere in the collada load code.

I'm going to test #2 here shortly after I finish moving all of my model animations 8 units up, I'll report back when done.

EDIT:
Neither change has an effect on the problem. Can someone else try to use this model and give it a basic cyclic animation and see if you can repeat this? if not, I'd like to know what version of Blender you are using.

#11 Steve! What version of Blender are you using? 0.03b? Something older? I know you're using something ancient....

#12 Ok, I think I'm onto the problem. I went ahead and opened the model (unanimated), and in edit mode, moved it and rotated it the proper amount of units, then made a simple animation in pose mode.

Once I baked the animation however, the model reverted to it's original position and rotation for some unknown reason. I have no clue how to fix this, but I'm betting that fixing that will fix the animation issue I'm having.

EDIT: Update, I went through the model and wiped the animations from everything. Then I forced the model up and rotated it accordingly and applied the rotation and location in object mode. After making a simple animation, I've now got the rotation in the correct position when playing it, and now my model is flying in the air at you guessed it, 0.8 units upward... This is just getting silly and confusing. I'll try to re-animate everything with the origin and rotation at 180 degrees and report back.

Update 2, Move the model up 0.3 on the 'z' axis ([g] [z] [0.3] [enter]) and apply the location, this ensures the "base" model is in the correct position. I'm going to try animation with this setup now.

EDIT Last: Bingo! That did it. So, with the file from the original post, you'll need to move it up on the 'z' axis 0.3 units, and rotate it 180 degrees to properly load it. I'll save out my copy and replace the one on my web-server with this fixed version.

#13 When I use your .blend file and export to collada, then open in shape editor, none of the animations from the original solider seem to work. For example this is the run animation:

#14 You cannot use the original animations with the new model, you'll need to make your own sequences.