Talk:OniSplit

Here's is my latest on creating a modified TRBS.

I call this The Fly! lol

I used the head from owldreamer's Masterchief. It looked correct in Blender, but it is rotated wrong here. There is no texture map for it. Also, the texture mapping is off for the rest of the body, even though I did not make any changes.

Neo: Also can you take a look at this blender file and tell me what I did wrong:

http://edt.oni2.net/OniSplit/MasterChief.blend.zip

I imported owldreamer's Masterchief, renamed the geometries, set the parents, all the rotations were set to 0. But when importing to Oni, it was broken.

I also had a question about the naming of the geometries. In Blender the names go right_thigh, left_calf and so on. But when I looked at an exported ONCC as an OBJ, they are named thigh_right, calf_left. Which is correct? Especially when naming in Blender? Also, why does Blender have the the name left_left? I looked at the naming structure from the extracted ONCCkonoko_generic.dae which was imported into Blender.

I hope you don't mind all these newbie questions.

Thanks,

EdT

First the simple problems: OniSplit 0.9.4 contains:

• fix for flipped textures
• corrected left_left to left_thigh

Then the case of thigh_right, calf_left: these are old names, they should not show up in newly exported files anymore. I changed them to match the ones found here TRIA. In addition the old names were swpped left was right, right was left and this was fixed too when I changed them.

The rotated head: It happened to me too, not sure what I did to get it working. What I think you should try is to unparent the head, move it to origin and rotate it so that it has the same orientation as Konoko's original head (along the X axis, not the Y axis). After that you can use that "Apply Scaling/Rotation to ObData" option, reparent it to neck and translate it back in its place. I'll experiment more with this later and I'll try to make a definitive list of steps to take to do this type of thing.

The MC body: this one has a slightly different problem than the head but not totally unrelated. Note than when you select a body part the "center" point for rotations (the origin of bone's coordinate system) shows up somewhere at the bottom. Compare this with what happens when doing the same thing with an exported TRBS: that point is where the "joint" is. Currently I don't know how to move this in Blender. For head I used that ObData To Center option but this is does not always work, the joint is rarely the center of the bone.

Neo

I see from this discussion that from now on I should be working with newly-exported TRBS files. Unfortunately, I've already put a lot of work into Griffin in Blender, so I'll have to manually fix things like wrong part names (I do see calf_left and thigh_right in my file, for instance). From now on, I'll only work on newly-exported models. But on that note, is it better to export as OBJ or DAE? Should I be going with DAE from now on?

Also, what does it mean when OniSplit doesn't return an error (or any message at all) when I use create:trbs, but it generates a file that's only 984 bytes? Because that's what happened when I selected Disable Physics and Current Scene Only and then used OniSplit 0.9.3 on the resulting DAE file. It's like there's header info for different file types but no actual data there.

For the most part, it seems like I should wait for you two to sort the problems out before I continue trying to import. EdT is already further along than I am, even with his horror-movie-like results. :-) --Iritscen 15:45, 11 April 2008 (CEST)

Neo: Thanks for the update and the instructions.

Iritscen: Have you tried selecting all before exporting from blender? Also, couldn't you extract the TRBS for Griffin and them import the your modified head into it? Is it possible to select an object in one file (such as your modified head) and then copy and paste it into another (the new TRBS file) in Blender?

Yesterday, Macupdate had a promo on Cheetah3D for $79.00, I quickly got it. I like using Cheetah3D, its much more intuitive for me. Right now, I'm trying to fix owldreamer's Masterchief. It looked odd, many of the surface triangles were black compared to the regular ones. You can see how they looked in the Oni Spartan thread at OCF. But when I applied "flip normal" to them, they looked correct. What does flip normal do?

Anyways, once I fix all those triangles, then I'll try getting the Masterchief into Oni.

EdT

I have not tried selecting all, but I also don't have "Selection Only" checked (I don't think that's the exact name). Still, I can try selecting all first. But at least the head should have been exported, because it was definitely selected. Re copying from one file to another, I think Blender is a one-document application. Perhaps I can copy the head, then close the document and open another one, then paste the head in. It's certainly worth a try.

"What does flip normal do?" As Wikipedia puts it, "Surface normals are commonly used in 3D computer graphics for lighting calculations". A normal is simply a calculation of a line passing through the polygon at a right angle that is best performed at the time of saving the file rather than at runtime in a game, to save CPU cycles. But which *way* is the line going through the 'gon? If it's set to go the wrong way, the polygon will be lit on the inside, not the outside (at least, the outside won't be lit), hence black polygons. As to why normals get flipped in the first place, *shrug*. --Iritscen 16:42, 11 April 2008 (CEST)

Hmm... a bunch of comments :). Let's see a couple of them:

• Selection: you should have no trouble with selection if "Only Export Selection" options is not used. Of course, since Blender "checkboxes" differ only in colour between checked/unchecked states you may want to be carefull about what options are checked. In addtion make sure you selected the scene you want to export before exporting if you have more than one scene.
• Copy/Paste: I have no idea how to copy/paste stuff in Blender. I wonder if it actually supports that, I have a feeling that it does not...
• Blender - one document application: Yes, it is. But you should be able to import a file (obj, dae) in a "document".
• Cheetah3D: no idea how it is but it's probably better than Blender, anything's better than Blender (at least in terms of user interface) :). Not sure if it has a Collada exporter/importer?

Neo

Just a brief update, the latest version of Onisplit works fine. I am making some progress, though working with Blender can be frustrating. I lost a few hours of work, don't know what happened. I had hoped to have the Masterchief done over the weekend, but maybe in a couple more days, when I have more time.

EdT

Didn't you say you bought Cheetah3D? Even if it cannot export Collada you may still be able to fix normals and geometry positions using it and then export the bones to OBJ and assembly and export them using Blender. Blender only makes sense if you are willing to spend a lot of time to learn its user interface. My opinion is that it's a terrible waste of time.

Neo

Neo, that's about the workflow that I developed in working with the 3D models. I probably should have tried something basic, like swapping geometries from different characters, instead of trying to import the Masterchief model. But that's me. :-)

I tried a couple of approaches, first, I imported the entire Masterchief model into Cheetah3D, then positioned the parts similar to the way Blender imports the TRBS Collada files (That weird looking way that the arms and legs are rotated, though, I don't think I got the arms rotation correct) Since Cheetah3D cannot import or export Collada yet (The author says after the next FBX SDK comes out, he'll work on Collada) I have been exporting the file as .3DS. Next import into Blender, scale the model to size. Use the clear/apply scaling to obdata. Move the center point (object/transform center to cursor) to hopefully the correct position for each part, rename each part (Blender does not import the names correctly). Parent all the parts. Export the current scene with triangles, disable physics, use relative paths (is that needed?). Import into Oni... start game, select level where I imported the character. CRASH!

To isolate the cause, I then tried another approach. Import into Blender the Elite Hard TRBS Collada file created by Onisplit, then replaced a part, with the Masterchief part. Import into Oni and I would see the Elite with some Masterchief part. Next add another part and so on. This is time consuming, saving as I'm going along. Then, made another change, imported to Oni, CRASH. No problem, just delete the part and try again. But from that point on, any changes, even trying to undo the changes and go back to a point that worked, resulted in Oni crashing. That's where I lost the few hours work. Next time, as I make a change, I'll save the file in a different name.

But while, doing this process revealed some errors in the Masterchief's parts which owldreamer was able to fix.

If you see anything I'm doing wrong, or can suggest a better workflow, please let me know.

Thanks,

EdT

How many polys is the Master Chief model? --Iritscen 16:01, 14 April 2008 (CEST)

It would help if you can give me one of those TRBS.oni files that crash Oni so I can try to figure out the reason.

Neo

Here is the version with the Masterchief directly imported from the start. Both Blender and TRBS.oni files: http://edt.oni2.net/3D/MCfiles.zip

According to Cheetah3D for the Masterchief model: 19 polygon objects, 2580 polygons, 2580 triangles.

This is one screenshot I got before the lost data:

EdT

A quick update until I sort things out:

• the .oni file from MCfiles.zip is strange, it only contains the chest.
• exporting your .blend model to Collada and then creating a TRBS out of it seems to work fine, the body is complete
• it crashes for me after a while. More exactly it crashes when I get close to the MC (I replaced Barabus's body with the MC and I'm testing in level3). If I stay far enough it seems to be stable... really odd.

Neo

Have any of us exported a character and then imported them back in, without making any changes (aside from the format conversions)? In any case, it sounds like something in the rendering info (normals, bone center points, etc.) is messed-up, if Oni crashes when it's near to the model, because that's when the engine starts to calculate line-of-sight using model info, to know whether to render it or not. But I really don't know that much about how Oni's engine works. (You're sure it's not a scripted command that kicks in for Barabas that has a problem with the new model, right?) Also, at what point does the highest LOD kick in? It's been said to be pretty far away. Perhaps the crash happens when you cross that threshold?

Ed, it may not be relevant, but I'm curious as to which part you added before that crash after which the model became unuseable. Was it the pelvis?

--Iritscen 21:07, 14 April 2008 (CEST)

Yes, I have some exported/imported models, konoko_generic and tctf_swat, no problems with them.

LOD stuff: it looks like something LOD related since it crashes when you get closer but OniSplit does not currently support different LODs so it just uses the same geometry for all. Nothing really changes when it switches from one LOD to another.

The crash is caused by something that looks like memory corruption and last time I saw this it was related to high triangle count but it does not seem to be the case here, the triangle count is low enough.

Even more interesting: OniBrowser loads that "crashy" TRBS just fine. Now it's true that OniBrowser allows stuff that Oni does not allow (like more triangles) but it is also more likely to crash on bad geometric data (like bad vertex indices).

Neo

And one thing that I forgot about fbx/collada:

Autodesk has a converter that it is able to convert back and forth between the two. I tried the Windows version and it seem to work, hopefully the Mac version works too so you can use it to convert fbx exported from Cheetah3D.

Here it is: Autodesk FBX. It's a bit of hassle with "registration" but it's free.

Neo