Stonehearth Add-On for Blender (Animation)

Any chance @Wombat85 to upload your animation so we can see what happens (or does not happen)? Are you including your own animation for your own model or are you adding an animation to an existing model?

There are several things which can go wrong. E.g. the positions of single body parts could be wrong, so they are not “sticking together” during the animation… or the names do not match and in worst case the animation is not played properly.

Not sure if this is the problem but remember with alpha 4 you have to export your models with Z-axis set as right handed. Kinda messed up my models for nihonjin.

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Im a little bit confused with this whole modding thing. I just made this little Robot pet and want to animate it, do i have to manually create the Skeleton.JSON file?

CONFUSED

Can you describe a bit more what you’ve done exactly and what your goal is? Did you take an existing model which you’ve adjusted or did you creste a completely new one? Do you want to see it with existing animations in the game or do you want to create own animations? …

I made a completely new model from scratch

My goal is to animate it all my self as a learning experience than add it ingame :smile:

But my first problem is that i can’t export it as .obj but that is easy fixable by upgrading to home edition.

Second problem is the Skeleton you need for animation; You have to manually make this or is there a program for it?

Your blender addon handles the Animation JSON file does this also implies for the Skeleton JSON file?

Hope i did explain it more in detail this time

EDIT: I know you need to dissect your model and rename the different parts for the skeleton right?

EDIT2: Just had an insight! I need to make the skeleton in blender right? Then export it for the game itself!

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Exactly. I guess you took a look at this page, right?
http://www.stonehearth.de/weblog/blender/manual-english/manual-2-workflow#22

Good luck with the animations. Don’t give up! Although I’d recommend to start with models with not many parts, until you get the hang of preparing the skeletons and meta and all the import/export stuff. :smile:

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Totally looked over the manual :open_mouth: Thanks! Ill take a look tomorrow and see if i get some results :smiley:

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Yes. Actually what is later on included in the “animation file” (which will be generated by the Add-On) is a simple list of positions and rotations of this parts over time vs the origin.

Yes. You need to create a skeleton which includes the "starting points* of your parts.

I will have to put some love into the tool as I did not test it for a while (neither with the last build of Blender, nor of Stonehearth).

I just did a test with the idle sitting animation and changed some things, its working but the animation is way to fast? :open_mouth: :smile:

Waiting on my Home edition purchase to go thru there system.

Blender 2.74

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Happy that it seems to work :smile:. So you see that it is not really rocket science, once you got the idea, right? Now it is all about some practice :wink:.

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Its pretty straight forward just time consuming :stuck_out_tongue: They still haven’t verified my payment… :frowning:

Which i don’t get at all because i got the Stonehearth edition immediately… I wantssss tooo animateee now!

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The time consuming part will also become better once you have the files (skeleton and meta), it is “just” about animation… and that is all about practice :smile:.

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More question haha! Voxel_Pirate im using your Female.obj as learning model. Getting stuck on how the bones/Parenting is done; see screenshot. (open it in new window)

Does the size matter for these cubes? Something is going wrong and i can’t figure out what :frowning:

edit: what the hell… The Body parts are rotating on that weird point… I think it has to do something with the Q2 Export

EDIT2: The Transformation Orientation is on 0 0 0 but the object itself is off???

Having the model rotating on a central point like that means to me that the origin was not adjusted, i.e. the settings which are defined in the skeleton-file are not in place. The status message of the Add-On (bottom right) seems to confirm this by the message “Skeleton-file loaded: none”. If a skeleton was loaded, the name of the file should be displayed.

If you import an object into Blender and if you do not provide further information, the origin will be always set to a “weird” place. Actually all your parts of the model should have the same spot as origin. One of the tasks of the Skeleton-file is to “fix” this and prepare the model for further animations.

I know it is a bit painful, but I suggest to take the time and go through the playlist I’ve put together and which explains the idea behind the bones, origins, skeleton-file, etc.

The reason why there is no skeleton file loaded is because there is no skeleton yet; still creating an custom skeleton atm

Going to check your youtube playlist.

Ok, so if you have just loaded your .obj-file into Blender, what you see is normal. The task of creating the Skeleton-file includes to fix this situation :wink:.

If i put the Orientation on 3D Cursor the body parts are moving on there on axis.

My skeleton setup is done then?; its the same as the female your provided as example :confused:

You need also to set the relationship between parents and childs as they should move / turn in relationship to each other, not free.

I did that. Could you check my blender file? There is something going wrong either on exporting to .OBJ or im doing something wrong in blender.

Sure, upload it somewhere and I can take a quick look.