Help - Tetsu0, Qwertyus & model arti Created 8 years ago2016-09-01 18:28:02 UTC by 23-down

- Textures still WIP.

Hi for 2 days now I'm attempting to get a rotor rotation animation going for my re-skinned Black Mesa chopper. So what I did is creating a bone structure and assign 2 rotation bones one for each rotor - the rear rotor & the front. So far this works charming and I can rotate the rotors within the vertex groups.

My problem is that the rotors move with the rotating bone instead of just spinning around with it. That naturally doesn't look very pretty and I hereby request urgent help. My modeling skills are still somewhat lacking it seems.

For real model artists such as Tetsu0, Qwertyus and anyone else qualifying: This should be a matter of 2 minutes for you guys considering everything is already setup. I'm confident that you can find my error.

Model Dl: http://www.filedropper.com/missingrotormodel
I provided the Blender files and in addition 3DS and OBJ. Formats in case you don't work with Blender. Please help me somebody I'd appreciate it!

Are you trying to make a helicopter model like the Apache or one where the rotor blades can be controlled from code?

In the case of the former, you won't need bones. Just animate the rotor blade rotation using keyframes. You should be able to do this by rotating the blades 360 degrees in the last frame, your modeling tool should be able to interpolate the blades for each frame.
This tutorial should be of assistance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiWYBmwUmd0

In the latter case, you'll have to assign the blade vertices to a bone that represents the rotor axis, then attach a bone controller that can move the rotors. I'm not sure how this is done in the modeling tool itself though.

Hey Solo I'm just trying to get a sequence animation going. The Helicopter will be used per monster_generic.

As for Keyframes I tried that as well. But for some reason instead of spinning around they went larger and smaller once I inserted the key frames into dope sheet. No clue what caused this behavior but I couldn't fix it. Which is why I began creating the bones with the Apache and it's Idle 1 sequence as inspirational source.

In the latter case, you'll have to assign the blade vertices to a bone that represents the rotor axis, then attach a bone controller that can move the rotors.

Yes that's what I did. My problem is that I can't get the angular right as the blades don't rotate smooth but instead look as if they had a buckled wheel to throw in a comparison with a bicycle.

I think your main issue is that the rotating parts of the chopper are a part of the main body.
to make everything easier, separate the heckrotor and the rotor from the main chopper so you have 3 separate objects.

The bones take care of keeping everything together.
From there you can do a 2 keyframe animation for the rotation.

When you're in the graph editor, you can linerize the graph to get a constant rotation.

I'll do a quick video on it so you can try it for yourself.

---

This video link should be live in a few hours. Just keep trying if it isn't - I'm uploading it now.

https://youtu.be/BXwSKP8LSAM

In the video you'll see a few main steps.

1) deleting the existing armature (sorry)
2) duplicating the helicopter object two times
--- Deleting the body and top rotor (rotor_rear)
--- Deleting the body and rear rotor (rotor_top)
--- Deleting the rotors (body)
--- You'll note i'm selecting & deselecting the existing vertex groups
3) rotating the helicopter to lie as close as i can to the XYZ axis - trust me when I say it makes animating easier
4) creating a new armature
--- create main body bone
--- create top rotor bone, parent to the main body bone
--- create rear rotor bone, parent to the main body bone
5) parent helicopter parts to the correct bones
6) open the dope sheet and animate
--- you'll see me struggle with this in the video since i'm not an expert with it haha
--- on the graph sheet, once you create 2 keyframes, it draws a line between them. this line defaults to a smooth falloff.. Normally great for regular animations, bad for constant speed rotations
--- I modify the tangent angles of the start and end keyframes to make a linear path between keyframes (There's probably a better way to do this, but I don't know it, and this way has worked for me in the past)
7) I played with the animation framerate to smooth out the animation since we're only rotating 90 degrees over a few keyframes. You'll have to define the same FPS in your QC file when you compile.

Other things to note:
You shouldn't do a complete 90 degree rotation because the start and end keyframe are in the same spot - which will display the rotor in the same spot twice. If you look close enough you can see this in the video.
This is hokey, but we can get a smoother animation with some math: say you want 5 keyframes per 90 degrees.. that's 18 degrees per keyframe. so you want to rotate the rotor 90-18 for a total of 72 degrees.. So the next keyframe is actually 0, but since you have 4 rotors, it mimics the full 90 degree rotation.
Hopefully you can follow along with the video for yourself and learn. Try it over the weekend and if you can't get it, I'll upload what I have and you can just animate the rear rotor.

Tetsu0: Wow you're truly a god! Thanks for that.

I will immediately try replicating your steps and then report back to you.
It's actually interesting that's originally as I had it at first. 3 separate meshes but someone told me that they need to be linked together as 1 mesh in order to work in Hl1. That's when I created the vertex groups and made the chopper to 1 mesh.

The way you animated the rotor was very fascinating too. I didn't even know about this generator window & graph setting you were in. In the Helicopter case I had 6 frames and manually shifted them step by step by 60 degrees 6x60=360. Good to see that this can also work other ways. Just like in your example the last frame would be on the same locrot as frame 1 would be.

Questions:

1.) How can I show the grid again? Can I make it larger?

2.) How do you extend bones up a 90 degrees angular? When I do it while holding down ctrl it goes smooth but skewed in side view. Yours went straight up and you too were in side view.

3.) How did you make a copy of that one bone? You simply took the original and moved a new bone straight outta it, how?

4.) I did it!! I successfully animated my helicopter! Fantastic and that is all thanks to you Tetsu0. You're amazing!

Now I've got only one problem left bothering me. How do I export everything as one scene instead of 2 animation sequences? It'll be annoying if the mapper had to use 2 entities in order to fire up the rotors.

Ok I figured that one out per action editor. Next problem: Once I implemented my Animation sequence and compiled the model the animation isn't playing. It's acting static.

Any idea what I might have done wrong here?

See my latest progress:

http://www.filedropper.com/animatedblackmesaheli

1) The grid size is controlled in the 3D view window, there's a [+] in the top right corner. The settings are somewhere in there.

2) when you're extruding a bone (or moving or rotating something) press X Y or Z to constrain movement to that axis. Also you can press Shift+axis to constrain to everything BUT that axis.

3)Shift+D duplicates an item. Thats how it seemed to appear out of nowhere

4) congratulations!!

5) you need to convert the smd to goldsource. It comes out of blender in the source format. Check my profile for my Blender to Goldsource video series. There's links to all the tools.

Hey I did that... It didn't do the trick.. The animation simply is not playing... Can you take a look please. I uploaded you the chopper with my implemented animations.

EDIT: For a moment I thought I found the issue at hand. By now I discovered that the Animation frames are underlined in red. Indicating that they're not working.

Then I found this interesting Article:

http://aligorith.blogspot.de/2010/11/f-curve-first-aid-identifying-and.html

But the red lines reappear the moment I fix the F-curves so it has to be something else I guess.

Now I even attempted to use your method of animating still no luck. As last resort I can only imagine that it is not working due to the fact how the actual body group is set up. The good news is that the red lines are gone now. So it's a small step into the right direction.

My guess by now is that the QC and the body meshes might be responsible for my Animation not firing up.

In it's original form the chopper came split in 2 different meshes which are the actual body of it. (without bones)

Now I'm unsure how I would have to rig (especially bones) my 1 mesh chopper as a replacement for the bodies S1 & S2. Perhaps having 2 body meshes and later my 1 mesh helicopter is something the QC file doesn't like?

Speaking about the QC file. That's another strong possibility for why my Animation ain't working. There are no bones defined except 1 (which sits on the exact same spot where I centered the view for Blender earlier today).

But we're having actually 3 regular placed bones. 2 Rotating bones and the body bone in the middle of the model.

The original model itself never had any bones. Do you know how to edit the QC file to integrate the bone names? I wouldn't know what numbers to type in.

Another odd thing. Upon closer inspection I noticed that the exports didn't contain my bones. That fact alone makes it impossible to work as intended. I figured that out in the model viewer.

EDIT1: I've uploaded you my latest internal build using your Animation method.

http://www.filedropper.com/bmrf

I think it's getting clear that not the QC or even body group are responsible but me. I'm doing something wrong while exporting considering it is not exporting the bones when I export my animation. So it just can't work. Perhaps the way we rigged the bones was wrong seeing that even some scripted sequence choppers such as this one got a whole connected bone structure. ???

Other chopper for comparison:
http://www.moddb.com/games/half-life/addons/ah1-ah1-mini-cobra

Latest internal build:

http://www.filedropper.com/bmrf

Any ideas what to do next Tesu0?

Hey man i won't be at my computer for at least a day so i can't take a look yet. What i can say is check the name of the action, bitmap texture and pay attention to the export process.

What's your QC look like and are you getting a successful compile?

Also make sure you have version 2 of the S2GSC tool. Version one does not work.

Hi...

Ya the export works fine and thus far I tried different approaches in regards of exporting the animations.

The QC looks like this:

$modelname "e135Heli.mdl"
$cd ".\"
$cdtexture ".\"
$scale 1.0
$cliptotextures

$bbox 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
$cbox 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
$eyeposition 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000

//reference mesh(es)
$body "body" "s1"

$body "body" "s2"

// 1 hit box(es)
$hbox 0 "kHED" -211.500000 -220.520004 0.000000 291.369995 222.509995 148.380005

// 1 animation sequence(s)
$sequence "seq" "seq" fps 30 loop ACT_IDLE 1
$sequence "rotors_on" "rotors_on" fps 30 loop
$sequence "top_rotor" "top_rotor" fps 50 loop

// End of QC script.

As you can see very simple and only 1 hitbox kHED (bone?) is defined here.
The other bones you created in your tutorial which I recreated including their names aren't listed here just yet. Not sure how to add that.

But as said before the Animations itself also don't seem to list my bones:

rotors_on Animation:

version 1
nodes
0 "blender_implicit" -1
1 "rotor_rear" -1
end
skeleton
time 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 -8.887785 -0.904976 0.579222 -0.000000 -0.000000 0.000000
time 1
0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 -8.887785 -0.904976 0.579222 -0.000000 -0.000000 0.000000
time 2
0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 -8.887785 -0.904976 0.579222 -0.000000 1.047198 -0.000000
time 3
0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 -8.887785 -0.904976 0.579222 0.000000 2.094395 0.000000
time 4
0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 -8.887785 -0.904976 0.579222 0.000000 -3.141593 -0.000000
time 5
0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 -8.887785 -0.904976 0.579222 0.000000 -2.094395 -0.000000
time 6
0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 -8.887785 -0.904976 0.579222 -0.000000 -1.047198 0.000000
end

As you can see it shows only "rotor_rear" up there and I don't even have a clue what "blender_implicit" is supposed to be. Normally it should list the bones "body", "rotor_top" "rotor_rear" in it as I had all 3 separate key frames and the 2 rotation sequences added in "rotors_on" through the Action Editor. But it looks as it just took the rotor_rear animation sequence while exporting I don't understand it.

As for S2GSC that should be the right one. It does give me my fixed files and I also rigged own custom made animations based on your tutorials you created me some while ago. That works.

I'm saddened to hear you wont be on your Computer for the next day but ok no problem.

Well there's definitely a problem; The other bones aren't exporting. Try selecting everything (press a) then exporting.

The blender implicit bone doesn't need to be there but it won't hurt anything.

Also also make sure that when you're creating your bones, enter edit mode on your "base" armature and duplicate from there, else you end up with 3 single-bone armatures instead of 1 3-bone armature.

Keep trying! It sounds like you're almost there

Hm I've got in the Armature tab 4 more entries in it:

Armature0.14 containing the bone "body"
Armature0.01 containing the bone "rotor_top"
Armature0.02 containing the bone "rotor_rear"
Chopper containing the Chopper mesh while Armature0.14 containing the bone with the name "body" is the designated parent for that chopper mesh.

Is that right or wrong? In either case I guess and will wait for your return tomorrow. I don't seem get to it working. My theory is that you can't have 2 separate animations linked to a single parent bone not sure.

But I suspect you're right I bet it's just some huge noob mistake I just made I too feel like we're getting closer to the solution. Just few hours back for example I noticed that my parent bone wasn't even linked with the chopper mesh itself. ^^ I fixed that by now but it's still not working.

It also comes with a distasteful side effect. My rotors will offset now when I'm attempting to have them plus the parent bone inside my animation rig. I can move em back by hand of course but I'm not sure that's supposed to happen at all so I aborted the test run. See you tomorrow. Hopefully you can find the issue at hand. I'm getting desperate here. Good night.

I'm getting a compile error "too many vertices in body"
I've gotten that before but i've gotten around it by splitting the model into parts. I'm going to eat something and get back on that.

Cool thanks for your assistance.. That you get the compile error is odd (In Blender or modelviewer?). For me it seems to compile just fine (in blender) with the exception of the Animations not playing.

I did try something else by now. I deleted all my bones and replicated the file and bone structure with that of this AH1 chopper I showed you yesterday.In Blender everything looks alike and when I compare the 2 models and their structure everything looks good. So I compiled the model of course it just wouldn't want to compile no explanation given by Jeds modelviewer. It just says grabbing the chopper.smd and then it exits.

This is truly getting frustrating. How ever the fact you said there would be to many verticies makes me think. In it's original design the chopper indeed came in 2 meshes the body separated in 2 half pieces.

Here's the original chopper model if you wanna take a look for comparison:

http://gamer-lab.com/eng/mdl_goldsrc/e135Heli

how did u convert blender model to works with half-life 1?

I got it to compile but now only the root bone is animating. i had this issue before and i dont remember how i solved it. still working on it

@ ninjadefuse: I have a video series on that

Really you managed to get it compiled and partially animated ? Very nice. Feel free to upload your version over then I will aid from your file version on in the attempt to get it entirely animated...

I'm still struggling to get my version compiled over here. I can either use the default asset which came with the model to get it compiled but without any working animations or I attempt to make mods in the hope to get the anims working but then it wont compile at all..

It's typically me. If there are 10 easy models to choose from for a Black Mesa re-skinned Helicopter I of course have to select the hardest one causing trouble. Anyway I will keep working on it. I got a feeling that you're close to a solution.

Good luck to both of us.

GOT IT!

Details to follow soon

Wow really !??! Cool I can hardly wait!

I'm especially curious about the details because I want that know how for future references... I said it before I say it again "You're a god!" In a funny way this model belongs to you now considering you made it work I didn't. Well feel free to use it as you desire. It's been almost 18years and as far I know this will become Black Mesa's first released Aircraft in model format ever. Very well done.

---

I myself was just editing my previous post. I almost reached the stage of development you were in couple of hours ago. I received the "to many verticies" error. I was currently investigating for some experimental model compilers I read about which allow you to even compile 20k poly gone models for Hl1. Apparently arrangement released some beta at some time.

Once again congratulations my friend. Who would have ever guessed that such a small model would keep us occupied for 2 full days.

Looking forward to get the model and the details relaying to your breakthrough.

You're limited to about 1000 vertices per SMD. So you need to export the model as many different parts, but they all compile into a single model.

I went back in and created vertex groups. I then used an Armature deform on the vertex groups instead of straight parenting.

I'm gonna try a few more things to see if i can get an easier workflow, then I'll make another video. This time, I'll talk through it and I'll see if i can grab the blender plugin that shows keystrokes and stuff.

After that... since it's already done.. haha I'll upload it for you.

Amazing.. I'm looking forward to both... I can't stress enough how happy you made me today.. thanks.

Now with this out of the way thanks to your effort I'm already prepping the next birds. Thankfully these work as they were pre designed.

I think I gonna release a small BMRF chopper pack on moddb soon. I just wish I started messing with Blender few years earlier. Most hl1 compatible models are gone by now. There used to be whole model databases in the net. CS alone had models for everything from simple bushes to helicopters and planes. Kinda sad that this is all gone.

I suppose my next step regarding models will be to actually create models myself other than editing them.

Video coming soon! In the meantime, here's the model for you so you can poke around and see how I laid things out - HELICOPTER MODEL DOWNLOAD

Blender is pretty awesome man! Once you get used to all the steps... export, fixing SMDs, QC scripting... it's not too hard to model for GS!

Absolutely stunning. I will study it carefully the files you provided under tutorial.

I await your video... Once I release that I will definitely add you to the credits without you that chopper wouldn't exist. Brilliant.

I agree once things are working and you get used to the controls etc. it's kinda fun messing around with it. And as it goes for every mapper or modder in general. Creating something new and unique is always fun.

Is Guistudio still working for you? For me it stopped working ever since I'm on windows 10. It never finds the QC despite the fact that it is in the same folder.

EDIT: I checked through the files.. Fantastic work making 4 pieces outta1 or formerly 2 in the original state.. I will most certainly remember that.
I was wondering how to do that with the bones when the chopper would be split into pieces.. You just kept em there in every mesh on the same place. Fascinating.

Also thanks for that lovely compile.bat I never considered using one for modeling. I never considered it.. Very nice to have a 2nd compiler once more along with JEDS I'm afraid gui-studio is out of commission for good.

Guistudio doesn't work for me anymore either. I get the same error and I address a solution in the video.

Also in the video is how I split the mesh up into the pieces, and how i parented everything. It's literally a from-scratch tutorial!

It's 40% uploaded but it'll be live here in a few minutes! VIDEO!!

Neat... Checking your video out.. Btw. one thing I can already tell.. Your voice is barely hear able.. I'm wearing headphones and maximum volume and I still barely hear you.

I recommend to take the video file and scale the volume up a little with any random vid or audio tool.

Other than that nice work on your latest creation. You're getting quite a video collection here..

As for the chopper: I'm still missing around with it.. I discovered an evil little texture misalignment on the mirrored side which I fixed by scaling and moving the UVs around a little. How ever once compiled it is as before sometimes even worse.

Any idea why it wont save the UV position while exporting? I hope I wont have to adjust the texture. Finding and fixing that or even creating a 2nd texture set would be awful.

EDIT: I just watched your video. I had to download it on my computer and watch it through VLC player in order to hear it.

It's really amazing you've got not idea how often how close I was in getting this done myself. I can't believe it.

But I learned 2 very - very interesting things from your video.
I was well experienced it several times that the model just moved away from the grid again having a completely different facing.

Ctrl A - apply rotation , location eventually scale and the same for bones. Wow if I had just known that you've no idea how frustrating it was to realign that many times. Eventually I just kept it was it was and adjusted the bones to that new rotation.

The second very interesting thing is the way you rigged the bones. Your top rotor was directly connected with your body bone while I kept all 3 bones separated. Not sure if that's bad since you can still assign the body bone as parent for the other bones per offset but still.

Very informative indeed. Thank you for that & for the model. You made my day Sir. As for my texture problem I can't get it fixed but what ever I think I'll release it anyway after all you will see these choppers mostly in the distance for scripted_sequences anyway so who cares?

Your voice is barely hear able

Sorry about that. I'll have to keep that in mid for the next time i make a video

Your top rotor was directly connected with your body bone while I kept all 3 bones separated

In this application, that doesn't really matter. It was just habit to extrude another bone out of the base instead of duplicating a new one.

As for my texture problem I can't get it fixed

I did not notice that until now because i only worked in wireframe, but I see what you're talking about and you need to re-do the UV map for sure. I also noted some missing polygons where the rotor meets the body... If you need help with these two things, you know where to find me!

Hm I just released see here:

http://www.moddb.com/games/half-life/addons/black-mesa-helicopter-set-reskinned

But yes a patch for it might be good to make it perfect. I spent the last 2 hours trying to fix it so I guess I need you once more. Thus far I have never really tried to create own UVs because my imaging expertise sucks. So I rather tried adjusting the UVs to the textures than vise versa. PSP is giving me a hard time in overwriting certain settings or adjustments when saving the file etc..

As for the polygons yes I noticed that too yesterday. I fixed it on my end by reversing to the original mesh. I totally forgot about that. You had an older mesh to work with. Damn. But shouldn't be hard to fix. Perhaps with the connecting vertices method?

Ps: As for your video I should be able to scale the volume up for you and upload it in filedropper. You would just have to re-upload it? Since you made the vid as general tutorial I think it shouldn't be wasted. Shall I pursue the matter? Shouldn't be a problem.

Sure man i would appreciate that

Here you go buddy:

http://www.filedropper.com/movieenhanced <<< smallest size lowest resolution.

http://www.filedropper.com/helivid <<< slightly higher resolution.

http://www.filedropper.com/widescreenvid <<< wide screen resolution.

To me all videos were a little pixel like even your original when watching it in full screen. So choose the one which in your opinion suits your eyes best in full screen. Since I'm using a very old flat screen monitor I can't really tell. ^^ I don't need nor want a large cinema like monitor for my computer.

I'll grab the widescreen one and do another upload later on then. That link will be dead, so I'll post a new one once it's done!

Thanks!

don't mention it. One hand washes another.