I'm an utter and complete newb to modeling, I'll admit it. But what I'm wanting to do is envelope the SWBF skeleton to a Jedi Outcast mesh to learn the process of rigging to models with a different pose. The question I have is this: What exactly is the process of rigging a model when it's not in the default pose? Can I just move the bones into position for the enveloping?

Yep. The position of the bones does not matter when you envelop a mesh to it. I've done what you described before with no problems.

Easy enough. Well, in principle anyway. Thanks

you cant just move the bones into another position, atleast not on the swbfskeleton. in order to make the enveloping recognize the new bonerotations you have to set the new rotation as neutral pose. this will most liekly mess up one or two bones. in order to envelope a model to a new pose you first need to fit the unit template bones to the pose and keyframe them and then improt a nullskeleton and match the transforms of the nullbones to the normal bones. then you can envelope the model to the nullskeleton.
this is not necessary for the a-pose because some of swbfs models are already in that pose and i think fragme converted their skeleton so that you can envelope jka models to it.

It seems I was wrong. My bad!

Actually you are both sort of right.
Since the model he is enveloping is already in the A pose it is a little easier.

If you import the default grounddummy model from Fred's site, get rid of the mesh part that comes with it and leaving just the skeleton to to work with.
You can the rotate the clavicle and shoulder bones to match your A framed model. Set Keyframes 0 and 1 for the bones you rotate. You can then envelope your model to the new pose
then weight it appropiately.

Now here are the things you must (should) do, when rotating the bones to adjust base pose work in Global mode with COG off. You have to set the keyframes or it will revert back. Move the bones before enveloping.
If you want to adjust the mesh you can actually envlope it, weight it, move it, store the keyframes, unweight it (you can save the weights off to a file for easy reapplication later this is done in the weight editor) freeze the model, reapply the weights, export, put in game and run around.


Additional usless (useful) information because I don't have a life and spent too much time playing.
The animation data and bone data that is exported is based off of global positioning, setting the neutral pose is only really required if you are going to do animations in XSI, it sets the local position and rotation to, amazingly enough, a neutral postion of 0,0,0 and helps to avoid gimble lock. That is the really wierd postioning of the manipulators that make it darn near impossible to do what you really want.

Oh and I do have a null based A frame skeleton but not a full "bone" one. Might make one though just for fun.


End of ramble