Grimrock

This is part of my continuing quest to make a decent looking skeleton without a shield.

Okay following the procedures outlined in Skuggasveinn's tutorial I exported my file (in this case skeleton warrior) from GMT to .obj where i opened it up in blender. In blender I then proceded to delete the models shield (and open three of it's fingers so it wasn't clutching anything before being thwarted on the fourth). After that I ran into huge problems with textures and UV maps (mentioned on my 'skeleton and its shield' thread), however I actually solved those. Now, however, I am still left with two problems. First, The model seems to have only one, or two depending on how you count it, node. Node 0 rootnode and node 1 MainObject. Also no animations work. The creature is scripted as a cloneObject of the skeleton so in theory skeleton animations would work were it not for the weirdness.

I have a strong feeling that these problems are connected. Does anyone know what to do? If I can get this thing working, I can then try to find out how to lower that arm in animations.

Don't think anyone has animations working yet. Think JohnWordsworth and Issac are almost there. Check the GMT thread.

But that doesn't explain why the nodes all disappeared and why unmodified animations don't work.

I don't know with Blender, but with 3dsmax if you save it in .obj it will lose all hierarchy and node naming information. I usually save as .dae (Collada) but even that does some name mangling under the hood and names are not so well preserved.

So if this is normal, then are my problems connected? Does one either need to follow a different procedure to modify objects with animations, or does my node problem have nothing to do with the animation problem?

Hi Asteroth, I'm afraid the Grimrock Model Toolkit doesn't support exporting full node / bone structures out from Grimrock Models yet, so it's not possible to export an animated model, edit it and then re-import it with the GMT (well, without losing animation support on that model). Unfortunately, this is a limitation of the OBJ file format. I'm working on adding FBX import/export through a C++ library and/or export of DAE files (including animations) from the Toolkit.

Oh, okay then I guess this is solved for now. (cuuursses, will I ever be able to make that thing?!)

@Asteroth: Heh, while things have slowed down a bit, the Assimp-Net wrapper I use has just been upgraded to support the Export API apparently, so I might be able to get it all working within the next few days!

That's great news John, I've been working on some animated animals that are simply waiting for a change to rip something to pieces

Skuggasveinn.

If you just want to remove the shield from the skeleton you can use the GMT to set the scale at 0 of the object "shield" in the animation files.
You can then use the GMT or the Animation Editor to change the rotation of the object "forearm_l" and eventually "arm_l" otherwise the skeleton would look like a waiter
However it's not intuitive and requires a very lot of trial and error (and time)