Hi Stonehearth-Fans (and Radiant):
Just wanted to let you know that I’m currently working on Skeleton/Animation export scripts for misc 3D Tools:
I realize things might still all change…but scripts can be changed too…and the basic functionality of the scripts will stay the same independent of most possible changes.
Just so you guys know, in case someone was planning on getting to work on this…
-djc
You still need master licence for Qubicle Constructor right to export as OBJ.?
Yeah 
It’s depressing
qubicle and radiant are still attempting to flesh out a “deal” for Stonehearth supporters to have a version of the tool… hopefully we’ll have some good news soon! 
Completed the Maya scripts too now.
Should I get around to it, I’ll look into the Blender scripts too…don’t know much about Blender though and Blender seems to take a slightly different approach on Pivots compared to the other 3D packages like Softimage and Maya.
But I’ll know more after playing around with it for a bit…
I was thinking that their should be a piece of software that automatically coverts .OBJ in to animation files. By adding in basic animation. So, all we would have to do is enter in the values we want to edit in or add new ones. That would stream line a lot of things. What do you guys think?
I wonder how possible it is, you’ll still have to rig it manually and in a way the script can do something with your rig.
Minddesk have changed their pricing, you only need the Home version to export .obj files now. It’s still 40$ but at least its half the price it used to be
Does anyone have a link to a good blender tutorial on how to add animation to a model? All I find at the moment is how to animate a blender scene. Thanks.
The maker of Minddesk and Stonehearth are working out some kind of deal for us. So, I would wait before buy the full version.
Rigging and animation is nothing that can be done automatically for a totally custom model. How would the automation know what part are movable and which way it should be animated. I guess you’re referring to the scripts Tom & Tony wrote for the bipeds. That’s only really practical if you actually have multiple models with the same exact dimensions and the same exact animations or if there are some predefined ways how your models are designed. The scripts I made are to export arbitrary rigs and animations into the Stonehearth format (well…the current format 
). If you would animate biped models, with identical dimensions as Tom’s models, you can just use the existing rig/animations from Tom without requiring any additional script or exports.
Most of the models can fall under classes or categorizes. For example, birds have wings and to legs. So, you would port your bird model into this program and it would automatically place the rigging in the right place. For the wings and the legs and if something is wrong you could just go into it and correct it. It’s really not that hard in concept.
Well, if the birds (or creatures with wings) all have the same movable parts and dimensions, not a problem.
If they have different dimensions or the parts have pivots in different places, it might be useful to have an animation import script. This would assume the models have the same parts (with identical names) and the script would create new keyframes based on predefined animation information.
So all in all, we require 2 scripts, scripts 1 exports only the keyframes of an animation, for each model part.
Script 2 imports the data of the previous script into a new model, matching the keyframe data for all parts with matching names. This sounds actually like something some 3d tools might already do on their own…copy/paste keyframe data between 2 models. We’d have to try that sometime. This would mean, people would ideally share their raw animation files (in Blender, Softimage, Maya or 3DS Max format) for other people to re-use the animation data. If we use import/export animation scripts, it would suffice to just share the exported animation files.
The current exporter scripts I wrote would not allow us that yet, since Radiant’s engine (current version) requires animation files that define each position/rotation of every part (not only animated parts) for every frame (each of the 30 frames). Using this data (instead of only keyframes) to import for another model, would not make much sense. But the scripts could easily be modified to not export each value for every frame, but only export keyframe data, for only animated parts.
…sorry for the rambling…I was typing while thinking about it…
It’s cool I understand what your saying. I still think it’s possible to do it. But I see what you mean with the scripts.
@djc having just begun this journey I am very interested in what the current state of your scripts are, especially the Maya ones. Also any interesting issues you might have come up against. Like I said I am very much at the beginning of this journey.
Let me dig this “old” thread out to share my feelings… while Blender is a cool tool to animate, coding in / for it is sooo annoying! 
I know YOU do not care, but I feel better now 
.
if it bothers you my friend, it bothers me… @Geoffers747 however relishes in your aggravation… he’s mean like that…
Sorry for the looooong delay…you’ve probably finished coding your plugin by now.
I haven’t done anything since my last posts…
Here you can look at the Maya script: Stonehearth - Maya exporter v0.1.obj(5.5 KB)
Note: This is a ZIP file…I renamed it to OBJ so I could attach it here! 
of couse, these scripts won’t export to the current file formats anymore, but what was the current format in May…but you should be able to modify the scripts without much trouble.
ack! we forgot to include .zip in the list of acceptable extensions? 
Yes, it seems so!