Skeletal animation (Tutorial #15)

Hi,

I've started to play around with tutorial #15 which came with sio2 v1.3.3. The example animation looks great, so I've tried to animate another model created by Ryan Dale:

(Credits: The model is taken from Ryan's excellent tutorial "Introduction to character animation")

The model is a little more complex than the model used in the tutorial and shows a very realistic walk cycle.
It runs smoothly within Blender, but so far I couldn't manage to get things run in the simulator.

What I've done:
- set the armature as the parent to the mesh
- assigned every vertex to a name group
- exported the model to sio2 (which seems to work basically, you can see the model stepping through different animation positions during the export)
- commented out the sound-related parts of the tutorial code
- loaded the sio2 file into the iPhone simulator

The app then starts up, I see the 'loading...' page for a while, and then the screen turns black without any error messages. I don't see a single frame.

It would be great if somebody could possibly take a look at the model . I'm far from being a Blender guru, so maybe I am missing something. I would also appreciate if there's someone out there who could give me a hint to the right debugging strategy in this case.

Thanks in advance,
Helge

Ok I had a quick look and modify the file in order to work... what was the problem:

1. No frame was inserted. (just go in pose mode for every frame that you want to export push CTRL+A to select all the bones then CTRL+I to insert the frame).

2. Make sure that everything that you want to export is located in the first layer (in example the camera was like in the third one and would not be exported etc...).

3. Then select everything in the first layer and export... in the code change "girl" for "boy"

Code:



   // Get the handle of our animated mesh.
   SIO2object *_SIO2object = sio2ResourceGetObject( sio2->_SIO2resource,
                                        "object/boy" );
                                        //"object/girl" );



4. I notice that not all vertices are assigned to some vertex group that will cause them to not be rendered with SIO2. (I also add vertex color just to make the model more clear in SIO2 since there's no texture for the model and no lights are set in tutorial15 so...).

5. Don't export the eyes or link them to an armature cuz they got keyframe inserted on the mesh and cannot be joined the the mesh boy.

6. How can I send you back the file... your iDisk forbid me to upload it...

Cheers,

Cool, thanks a lot!!

I've just write-enabled my idisk, so it would be great if you could upload the updated model. Maybe the model could also be added to one of your future tutorials - it's free, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Again, thanks a lot for your quick reply.

Cheers,
Helge

This is what I get when Im trying to upload to your hard disk:

We're sorry. You cannot upload this file. Please try again later.

I put it on FTP:

http://sio2.dreamhosters.com/for_forum/BSoD-ItCA-final_MOD.blend

Apple's iDisk... iust downloaded it from your site.

Thanks a lot for your help,
Helge

I think I have a similar problem. I'm not getting a crash though. What I am seeing is about 1/10th of my polys are visible and animated. The rest are invisible.

I started by importing somebody's animation. I converted the mesh from quads to triangles and inserted a few key frames (total of 48).

It seems to be doing mostly the right thing, the polys that it does render are enough to see that it is the right size and shape and it is being animated. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

thanks,
George

Check your vertexgroup and material assigned to them... my personal trick is to select all the triangle that I need for a bone separate them from the main object, then create the vertexgroup.

When Im all done, I just join back all the object together...

Thanks. I checked and rechecked. Everything seems very much like tutorial15.

I made it sound a little too normal I think. It almost looks like the triangles that are rendered are stretched in long strips compared to their real shape. Like there is some kind of weird scaling problem.

screenshots?

The problem I had was due to exporting with the normals button pressed, not pressing it cured the problem (or at least the bizarre rendering symptom). BTW - I'm still using 1.3.5 (not 1.4).

This could be related to another prob I had with the model which is that the armature was rotated 90-deg in X. Why? I don't know but if the normals are somehow calculated incorrectly because of this rotation or due to not accounting for this rotation... ? Just guessing.

Turns out this was originally done because when the armature was imported and it was face down on import, so it was rotated in order to stand it up (maybe if the Ctrl-A was done at this point, all would be well). Related to this problem is another which occurs when you attempt to do a Ctrl-A to set "scale and rotation to object data", which might cure any problems related to the non-zero rotation, but for some reason Blender can't handle this and the mesh is contorted in a bizarre fashion when you attempt this.

I REALLY suggest you to use 1.4... In 1.4 the actions are separated from the object... Like that you can pre-load them or assign them on the fly while keeping a very low memory footprint... check tutorial15 in the latest SDK for more info...

I'll definitely switch. It sounds like it has a lot of good stuff.

thanks,
George

There's a reason why Its 1.4 and not 1.3.6

I want to do a human controller, for simple walking, running, moving around the scene in arbitrary directions. I'll change the animation to match the terrain or the speed of motion, but first things first.

So binding to a sphere object works using this method as you pointed out before:

animationModel->_SIO2transform->_SIO2parent = playerBallObject->_SIO2transform;

except I don't want my animated player rolling head over heals. How can I best accomplish this?