On Friday, March 18, 2011 07:08:14 AM S Andreason wrote:
> Hi Hal,
>
> Oh yes, it is possible. But not easy.
>
> Hal V. Engel wrote:
> > I have been able to get a AC3D export but of course all of the
> > armature stuff is gone and all I have at that point is a static model
> > that can not be animated.
>
> The export process from Blender may not be the problem. _If_ each limb
> is correctly defined separately, and a child of the parent limb, then
> the hard part is generating the _xml_ file that defines the center of
> rotation of each limb's connection, and how it rotates. Each limb needs
> between 1 and 3 axis properties.
> Take a look at the animated walker in the Bluebird aircraft.
>
> Stewart
> http://seahorseCorral.org/flightgear_aircraft
Sorry I should have been clearer. I didn't mean to imply that the AC3D
export was not working. Rather only that all it created from this armature
based model is a static model that had very limited posibilities for
animation. You are correct that if "..each limb is correctly defined
separately, and a child of the parent limb.." for non-armature animation that
the export would likely work OK.
The model I am looking at only has one mesh for the body including arms,
hands, fingers, figer tips, thumb, legs and feet. This mesh is drapped over a
set of armatures (bones) and it is designed to be animated by moving the bones
with that mesh following them (IE. no visiable seams). AC3D has no support
for armatures as far as I can tell so this imformation is lost on export and I
end up with a mesh that is the shape that the model was posed in when it was
exported.
Inside of Blender I can pull, push and/or rotate the bones to pose the model
in extreamly precise ways even down to changing the grip of the hands to fit
around controls. The exported AC3D model can be made to fit very nicely into
the cockpit but the only thing that can be animated is the head because it is
a seperate mesh from the rest of the model. Inside of Blender the posing
process is actually very elegant as all of the bones know how they are
connected and everything moves together as it should when one part of moved.
That is if you rotate the forarm the hands and fingers follow along with no
need to move them seperately. I am not sure (I am new to this 3D stuff) but it
seams to me that the same types of transformations should happen when the
bones are animated in sim/game (IE. move the hand with the stick and the
fingers, finger tips, thumb, forarm and upper arm should follow automatically).
But maybe I'm wrong.
The walker model is much like the existing modern pilot that is part of the
P-51D. Very unnatural and complex to animate and with seams at the joints
that are visible.
The OSG docs I have looked at indicate that it supports armature based
animation. So in theroy if I can get the armature based blender pilot into a
correct OSG 3D file then it should be possible to animate it and the animation
should be fairly elegant. But it appears that the Blender OSG exporter is
broken. It also appears that no one has tried doing armature based animation
with any file format from with in FG yet. So I don't even know at this point
if this will work with the correctly formed 3D files. What I am really trying
to get at is:
1. Will this work from with in FG?
2. If so how do I get well formed armature based 3D files that will work with
OSG out of Blender (I don't care what format it is as long as OSG understands
it)?
Hal
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