Game Editing > 3D Modeling & Content Creation

[MD2] import and animation problems in Blender

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kat:
OK, that's really bizarre and I've never come across this before but it kind of makes sense. MD2 and MD3 models store animation data in the vertex iirc as the characters don't have skeletal rigs in game. This means the model has imported in to Blender 'properly' - in that there are no distortions and animations play. But... the process hasn't 'split' that vertex animation data from the mesh and into their own Action sequences - there are no sequence segments (run, walk, fall etc) and no Action/IPO track you can visually check and edit even though animations are present. If you do create a new animation in that context it's breaking the pre-existing ones because they then play relative to the last pose of your custom anim.

You're going to have to do a bit of research on this one because in order to do what you want, you need to be able to see the animation track, so long as the animation data is held in the mesh it's going to be problematic for you to edit or create your own. You need to find a way of exporting/importing the animation detached from the mesh so the object can be set up in a way Blender can use.

And you're right about the rig wierdness, it does effect the mesh when you custom pose it but if you play back the vertex animations they have no effect on the armature, which is odd. The good thing is that all the animations are contained in what appears to be a single track so frames 1-25 might be 'run', frames 26-40 'death' and so on.

Asaeis Wi Vio:
Hmm, honestly I would have no idea how to import the animations seperately from the mesh; unless I asked someone from Id if they happened to have the old bones and the mesh lying around seperately.

I could try to find out how, but right now I am suffering from an illness which makes such things rediculously more challenging than they need to be; I struggled to get through even that beginner tutorial for blender animation, let alone figuring out how to seperate the animation positions from a model which are ironed together into a single file.

kat:
I'm not familiar with the MD2 tools for Blender (except from a cursory point of view) but doesn't the script give the option to import mesh and animations separately? Incidentally, wasn't the Quake 2 source released under GPL some time ago by idsoftware? If you track down those files they may have the information that's needed for this in Blender, that's how and why a lot of these Q2 based 'flavours' are produced, people are using the source code to make what they want with it.

With regards the illness, at least you'll now have something to distract you from it ;)

Asaeis Wi Vio:
An md2 script? Do you mean a plugin? This version of Blender allready comes with .md2 support without any additional plugins.

When I choose to import and .md2 model, there are no options or settings which it asks me to set for importing; it simply imports it into Blender.

The Quake 2 sourcecode? I'm afraid I don't actually know any programming languages :/

Also, thanks, allthough it takes up alot of concentration to even figure out how to add animations, let alone figuring out how the animations and models are saved in an md2; I can't really afford to concentrate on too much.

kat:
"source-code" is a generic term to mean "the source content" which often includes 'sample' assets and example files. I suspect the Quake 2 source files would be the same, so it's worth checking out to see what's in it, I'd be surprised if there weren't any character example files.

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