Metasequoia modeler tutorials and Keynote translated plugins

[Verdite]

Actually john after attaching that 'weapon' bone to the hand bone i got a blank mesh show up as in the screenshot.

So its kinda stumped me.

[HwitVlf]

I did more tests and think I've figured out the problem with the arm.  First off, incase anyone doesn't know, when the player equips hand armor, SoM replaces the swing arm with 3 new segments that are part of the hand armor MDO model.

The arm does need 4 bones (upper arm, forearm, hand, weapon), but the bones have to be in a specific 'order' in the MDL. Mick's x2mdl might have a bug in that it 'sorts' the bones in reverse order from what SoM expects. That makes the weapon move with the 'upper arm' segment, and all the 'hand armor' segments are reversed too. Mick could probably sort it out without much effort, if anyone wants to go over it with him on his site- but I'm too busy right now to get into that.

You can technically make a skeleton with an extremely convoluted structure that will make the arm turn out correct ingame, but it would be almost impossible to animate. Example is attached- try it with and without hand armor equipped.

Also- SoM expects the arm to start in a downward position on the first frame of each swing animation- like it is holding Verdite's 'sword alignment' mode. And then move up for the normal swing animation. This is because the weapon and hand-armor-segments move with the arm's parts so they won't align properly unless you start the arm in the expected position.

Lastly, x2mdl has a bug that sometimes instantly flips part of a model. Mick said it was fixed, but it's not. You'll see the effect in the attached sample arm MDL. We might be able to work around this problem by changing FPS if he doesn't fix x2mdl.

Sorry for the long, probably confusing post.  

[Verdite]

Actually i understood pretty much exactly what you were saying. So if i wanted an arm before x2mdl's fix, i'd have to reverse the skeleton?
And also do you know the order in the mdl?
Nice sword by the way. Looks good.

ALSOOOOO 
(edit)

How can i join up vertices and smooth the surface (of the two joined faces) in meta?
The pic here is my tree i made in blender by joining vertices, then recalculating the surface area (more or less smoothing.)

[HwitVlf]

Technically, you don't have to reverse the skeleton, you have to reverse the order the bones are linked together. It would have to look like the attached picture (I staggered the bone triangles in the picture so you could see the 'link lines' separately- they should actually be straight). You could animate an arm swing with this skeleton, but the arm would "tear itself apart" every time you move a bone. So you would have to manually realign each arm segment. The MQO sample I attached a couple posts above (reply#123 - ArmSamples.zip) has a rough skeleton setup this way.
The bone labeled 'root' would have no mesh attached and is just a 'tool' to keep the where it should be relative to the player.

AirFlamesRed cold answer about join/smoothing better than me, but Meta has a 'join vertices' option under 'object' as well as the loosely related 'reduce polygons'. For smoothing options, there's 'object > mesh smoothing' or right click on the object name and check one of the patches. I've gotten some interesting effects by applying the Catmull-Clark smoothing then reducing polygons.

[airflamesred]

Blender?! How did that get through security?!
I would use a cube, and extrude to make branches. Then smooth with 'mesh smooth' or 'Catmull-clark'. Mesh smooth is a bit of a strange smoothing alogarithm, similar to 'Doo-Sabin. CC, set at 4 on an elongated cube will give you 4x4=16 sections around and getting a bit high (poly) for the game I would have thought. I think taking UVs into account I might be tempted with a different approach altogether for trees.

For the smoothing to work you will need to join verts, either 'join closed verts' as John sais or just select the offending verts and 'selected/join verts'

You need to be carefull with blender as it can leave stray verts, which is impossible in meta. Blender has this strange idea that people want to be able to extrude verts. Makes no sense to me.

[airflamesred]

CC

[Verdite]

Thanks alot for this :)

And i had been doing this manually. Coulda saved alot of time hehe.

Now i realise how you sculpted John Barry without an edge loop function.

[Verdite]

HAHAHA

Love it :)

[Verdite]

So recently ive been inspired by Airflames and Wolf to start finally getting into the nitty gritty for custom npcs and knocking out some trials.

Ive been using blender for my facial construction, and learnt a ton over the past three days about face modelling. Braving it - the stature of blender - i came out with my first, earless face that i exported to metaseq via the obj export. I created my own "baked" texture, and modified the skin and rotated the image. (it came out with a y-axis flipped UV map)

Blender picked up the shadows in a basic lighting setup that i used, and this attached image has no material shadow modifiers at all.

I know that he's got the wide eyes going on but thats a wee trait of mine. (fish reference.)

[airflamesred]

Very nice Ben
The topology looks fine - its just a matter of stylizing it how you like. Big eyes, big chin or whatever.

It struck me to make a blueprint type of interface - so I did. I then realised I like the one I have.