Rise Of The Guardians

[semory]

Yeah, the bones are there. I think you have to use a different version of blender to get them .

[Runa]

Ah, I had that feeling. I have blender 2.49b, probably it requires a newer version XD

[semory]

Yep yep yep. I wish there was a format supported 100% by every modeler rather than 100 formats with features at most only 50% supported. Everything is so half-ass these days .

[Runa]

I confirm. With blender 2.56 bones appear. Now I have to figure out how to link mesh to skeleton and how to attach hair, eyes and mouth. I actually thought it was possible in max, since I know a pretty good method that works perfectly with TERA Online (the files load head and hair on the floor, just like in Jack's case), but it looks like all the mesh parts are merged into one, so yeah XD

I will also search for his staff and eventually Sandy, once I'm back from my lessons.

[semory]

oh ok, you want his staff and Sandy too? I have the PS3 files so if Jack is workable I'll do the next two. Shouldn't be too hard as I kind of have a hardcoded template now.

[Runa]

Yeah, Jack needs his stuff lol and Sandy is my second favourite character, so yeah :3

[Love2Raid]

Did anyone say my name?

Runa asked me some questions about this Jack model and I thought it would be good to post all the things I found here.

First:
You can save the 'new' .blend file as 'legacy mesh file', then it can be opened in the old Blender without any problems.

Now, you can see that he's indeed merged into one big object with 8 materials assigned to it:



You can solve this easily by going to Edit mode, then select all, hit P, then pick 'by material' (as seen below). Another option is 'by all loose parts', but you will end up with many loose parts then that will eventually have to be merged again (depends on double vertices etc. as well). After this, you can select the eyeballs, hair, teeth and move them to the right place (needs rotating too).



'Linking' is called 'parenting' in Blender. When a mesh isn't parented to an armature, it won't move/deform when you manipulate the bones, no matter how hard you try! See:



To parent, first select all the objects, then also select the armature (by holding Shift). Important: MUST be done in this order!! Now do this:



Ta da!



Oh... not looking OK.
Parenting has failed because the names of the bones (or 'joints') are not the same as the vertex group names, look:



So BEFORE parenting, either the vertex groups or the bones must be renamed. To make things worse, it's no matter of simply replacing that 'wmap' thing by 'joint' (or vice versa):



Even worse:





This reminds me of all the fun I had with that Merida model port. Except that she didn't even have bones.
Anyway, as you can see there is no way to tell which vertex group goes with which bone by looking at the names alone. Also, the same vertex group name can appear more than once in the entire model, but only once per mesh AFTER you have splitted it (like I showed above, with the 'by material' method). So make sure to split the mesh before you start renaming stuff. Parent everything after you have done that. What I would do, is rename all the bones first in a way that makes sense to you. Then split the meshes by material. You can now get rid of vertex groups that aren't used by any given mesh, in a very easy way with the mesh clean-up script of Blender: select mesh -> edit mode -> select all -> mesh -> scripts -> clean meshes -> Vgroup clean. Then look at every group in weight paint mode and try to figure out which bone they should be linked to. For example this:



That's obviously the 'head neck upper' vertex group (like we usually name it), so you can rename it to that. Do that for all groups, for every mesh. But it should be okay, since the rig is quite simple.

Once everything is renamed properly, you can join some parts again if that makes more sense, or split more parts (beter do that after the renaming ), just 'tidy the model up', so to speak.


I noticed some other things about this model, for example:



Some bones seem to have vanished...

And:



The UV map of the selected part is that tiny dot, so it's f'ed up. :/

I thought it might have been caused by the conversion from new to old Blender file, but nope:



Same issue here.

Everything else can be fixed with some time and patience, but UV re-mapping will be a tough job (possible, but it's not very easy). Maybe you can import the model as .obj, then do boneweight copy. The .obj model might have normal UV's. It's worth the try.

----

It will be a lot of work to fix this one, good luck!

[semory]

yeah sandy, the reason there is a bone missing at the end is that games use joints, not bones. In blender terms, a head is all that is needed to modify vertices, and without a tail, it's difficult to draw that last bone in the chain. some games do indeed include a tail, but this one doesn't unfortunately.

which UV map is messed up?

[Love2Raid]

Oh, right, that makes sense.
Well, it's not too hard to simply extrude the missing ones out of the final ones.

About the UV map, it's everything that is selected in the last 2 images. So his entire outfit, hair, eyeballs, teeth and most of his right hand (and a part of the left hand as well). The rest (face, feet, other part of the left hand) seems to be OK.

[Runa]

..................................I think I need some fresh air right now