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Usually youd just envelope to the bones, not to effs and roots. Maybe thats causing the problem. The skeleton shouldnt be the problem. Im on vacation from now on so fixes will come when Im back(8.)

So I take it it's not yet possible to, for example, assign a certain set of polygons a material flag such as glow, without making the entire polymesh glow?

The Nasal Abyss wrote:...the unit template that comes with ZeTools has a really messed up weirdly scaled appearance and is hard to work with...

Are you referring to the display size of the bone chain icons? These don't really matter and have no effect on the finished product. You can easily scale down their display size by selecting them all or one and pressing Enter then adjust the Size property in the Bone Display section under the Chain Bone tab, 0.1 should suffice.

Chain Bone Property Editor


@ANDEWEGET
The exporter doesn't seem to respect hierarchy. Parent/child relationships are destroyed. The PRNT chunks are nonexistent.

• tested with a null, cube and cylinder.
  the cube and cylinder were children of the null
  
  also tested with just a cube and a cylinder.
  the cylinder was a child of the cube

4 bytes = PRNT //chunk header
4 bytes = chunk length
x bytes = null terminated ascii string //x bytes = always multiples of 4

Ok thank you very much. Ill take a look at that tomorrow or the day after. I often forget to test the easiest things...

@Marth: That doesnt work yet. Storing the segments in the msh file isnt a big problem. I just need to find an easy way for me to fetch the cluster data(with weights and all). You could alternatively extract the polygons and use them as a separate model.

I'm sorry for this extremely noob-ish question, but do you still have to freeze transforms before exporting, like with meshex? Or can you just export straight-up?

Yes. When you edit a model's transformations, you are only temporarily editing them; they are only truly set once you freeze them.

Does this exporter work with player animations as well?

ANDEWEGET wrote:You dont have to freeze transforms. Usually its best to do it though.
Animations arent supported, there isnt enough info about how animations are stored in the msh file and before I take the time to research that Ill get everything else working.

Edit: Fixed hierarchies/children-parent relations BTW, will update later with revision 4.
Edit2: I believe I fixed your problem TNA, the packer thought bones have vertices etc, too.

Added revision 4. Hierarchies and bone exporting problems are fixed. I changed some structure to allow multiple segments/clusters, exporting multiple clusters isnt implemented yet though.

ANDEWEGET wrote:

ANDEWEGET wrote:You dont have to freeze transforms. Usually its best to do it though.
Animations arent supported, there isnt enough info about how animations are stored in the msh file and before I take the time to research that Ill get everything else working.

Edit: Fixed hierarchies/children-parent relations BTW, will update later with revision 4.
Edit2: I believe I fixed your problem TNA, the packer thought bones have vertices etc, too.

Added revision 4. Hierarchies and bone exporting problems are fixed. I changed some structure to allow multiple segments/clusters, exporting multiple clusters isnt implemented yet though.

Awesome. I'll download and test as soon as I have the time.
@Animations: Ah, I see. I'll find some way to export mine.

I just noticed that I broke uv exporting... Updated the first page with link to 0.9.05.02.
The Pandemic Exporter is doing some magic with bounding boxes I dont really understand, so my exporter will just export basic bounding boxes... for now.

Ande, just thought I would let you know something about the exporter is crashing player models. I rigged up some armor and then tried exporting with your exporter, and then it ended up crashing the game. I then exported the same armor as a .xsi file and imported it into one of my old trials that I re-installed. I exported it with the regular pandemic addon and it ended up working perfectly in-game. I just thought I would let you know that something is making player models from your exporter crash. I got no errors, and the only thing that seemed out of the ordinary was that it wasn't exporting all of the geometry of my model. Only 1048 vertices showed up in the mungelog.

Could you send me the .msh file? Then I might be able to find the problem.
Did you get any errors ingame?

Sorry, I deleted the mesh file and didn't save the .xsi scene It was a test so I didn't keep any of it.... I'll try to export another player model with it and see if it does the same thing.

ANDEWEGET wrote:That would be nice.
Im a bit uninspired right now, but Ill do some more work in the next week or so.

Added r1 to the first page. Compared a pandemic-exported unit to a zetools-exported, the only real problem I saw was that exporting envelopes(not weights) was broken(had the wrong size indicator). The transforms of the bones were very different to the transforms of the bones from the pandemic-exported unit I checked... I have to look into that sometime.

Changelog:

• Progress bar now displays more steps(per model/material).
  Improved general packer structure.
  Fixed(?) bone and envelope exporting(at least no size indicator and structure errors anymore).
  Generally improved code(exporter automagically adds .msh to file name, dictionaries for certain things etc...).

ANDEWEGET wrote:

• Progress bar now displays more steps(per model/material).
  Improved general packer structure.
  Fixed(?) bone and envelope exporting(at least no size indicator and structure errors anymore).
  Generally improved code(exporter automagically adds .msh to file name, dictionaries for certain things etc...).

Yess..
I'll download later and test it out. Thanks for the update!

This picture tells us:
1. Vertex colors are totally working(for anyone who didnt know yet/didnt believe it).
2. Units no longer crash, if you look close you might see that his left foot deforms weirdly, this means weights work to some degree and so must bones.
3. The cube and the sphere(right corner) are collision primitives. Those work like a charm, too.
4. Not really visible on this screenshot but scaling works now, too. ZeroEngine seems to ignore scaling stored in the .msh file, so I multiplied every vertex position with the scale values to get world-positions. This means you dont have to freeze the transforms to apply scaling.
(5. BBox are somewhat working now, too. Had to multiply the extents with the corresponding scale to make them look right.)

I didnt update the download yet, Ill play around a bit more today and update later.

ANDEWEGET wrote: 2. Units no longer crash, if you look close you might see that his left foot deforms weirdly, this means weights work to some degree and so must bones.
r.

Sweet.

ANDEWEGET wrote:

Hidden/Spoiler:

Will update link later. tirpiders MSH info tool really helped me, it seems I always missed that the WGHT indices into ENVL begin with 1, not 0. With units working(or seeming to), that leaves... cloth(and animation, but forget that for now).

Updated first post with 0.9.06.02. Did not do much testing, but units should work now. Multi-weights should work too(dunno if they work ingame), but if youre experiencing problems(bad weighting ingame)better only weight to 1 point per vertex.

And ignore the cloth stuff, that doesnt work yet.

Thanks for the update.
I just tried to export the Darth Vader template again,(I've been using it to test the model export, never worked so far) and it still did not work. Before I was just getting weight error messages in the
PC_MungeLog. Now, I'm getting this..

So I take it exporting null hierarchies does not work yet still, correct? (e.g., exporting a model with a dummyroot, things like turrets with parent nulls, etc.)