[Stellaris] Portrait export woes and bindpose issue?

[RyuujinZERO]

I've been trying all week to get an animated portrait into Stellaris, and every time I seem to run across some new stumbling block. I have at this stage managed to narrow down my problems to two discreet issues - and I can't see any way past them.

I really hope someone can help as I'm at my wit's end.


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The first is Maya becomes super unstable once I add the "animation" attribute to the root, scrubbing the timeline or playing back causes crashes, as does animation export frequently (But not always, it's truly random). I have taken to simply not adding the animation attribute to the root until the last minute as a workaround but this doesn't chaneg the fact it often takes multiple attempts to get it to export an anim without hanging.


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The second is that some bones/skin bindings get randomly screwed up.

The only pattern I have been able to find between the broken bones and the working bones, is that in the output list, the working bones have their BindPose at the bottom of the output list, while the broken bones have their BindPose at the top of the output list. I may be wrong but this appears relevant to how the exporter handles the bones in the finished mesh or animation.

EDIT (14/6/16): I figured out how to remove the bindpose and re-generate it, forcing it to the bottom of the list, it had no effect. Bug persists... I'm at a loss to explain or resolve.

 

[RyuujinZERO]

Still stumped on this and can't move forward until I get some help.

tl;dr - when exported some of my joints are translated to the centre of the portrait and scaled down to zero in game and I cannot make rhyme or reason why it is happening. Exporter crashes at the drop of a hat during animation export, again, completely at random.

I've rebuilt the mesh and bones from ground up, trying different things 5 or 6 times now and tested dozens of hypothesis and to no avail. At this point the problem looks like it's in the exporter logic not the model.

Is there a cap on how many joints or skins a portrait may contain?

 

[J. Mourne]

Bumping this because I'd like to see some guidance on this as well.

 

[RyuujinZERO]

At this point I can only surmise that the Clauswitz Exporter is NOT fit for purpose with Stellaris. Nobody else has managed to export a non-trivial working animated portrait, I have managed to export only trivial complexity animated portraits, and even then with many many many crashes and issues with the exported model.

Guess I'll be rolling back my plans to 2D portraits too then until someone who understands the exporter can help me identify why it is not exporting all the bones properly.

 

[K-vald]

Hi, that sounds pretty weird, have you been checking the guide on how to export and create new portraits in Stellaris found here?

scrubbing the timeline or playing back causes crashes, as does animation export frequently

This is due to some problem with Maya 2016. When I was playing around with 2016 to try to nail down this problem all I could find was that Maya seemed to have some troubles handling mutliple meshes binded to one rig.

Is there a cap on how many joints or skins a portrait may contain?

Yes, 50 joints is the maximum.

 

[Maxwell Edison]

Yes, 50 joints is the maximum.

Are you sure about this? I went through some of the vanilla meshes with jorodox, and some had as many as 600 joints.

Though that might just be a bug with jorodox.

At this point I can only surmise that the Clauswitz Exporter is NOT fit for purpose with Stellaris. Nobody else has managed to export a non-trivial working animated portrait, I have managed to export only trivial complexity animated portraits, and even then with many many many crashes and issues with the exported model.

Guess I'll be rolling back my plans to 2D portraits too then until someone who understands the exporter can help me identify why it is not exporting all the bones properly.

I found a work around to the squished mesh problem. I simply checked to see which vertices were acting up, and added joints and used weight paint to make the vertices conform to those joints. That said, there may be a maximum number a joints like K-vald said.

Also, make sure that your root joint isn't skinned to any of the meshes, that was the *cough* root of one of my problems.

 

[K-vald]

Are you sure about this? I went through some of the vanilla meshes with jorodox, and some had as many as 600 joints.

Yes, definitely, a mesh with 600 joints is not something we have in any of our rigs, that is an absurd amount of joints for what we're doing.

that was the *cough* root of one of my problems.

 

[Maxwell Edison]

Yes, definitely, a mesh with 600 joints is not something we have in any of our rigs, that is an absurd amount of joints for what we're doing.

You're a dev aren't you.
Now I feel silly for not checking the title under your name.

 

[K-vald]

You're a dev aren't you.
Now I feel silly for not checking the title under your name.

Haha, that would be correct!

 

[Hess-1]

Could I post my Maya-project file, for someone to have a look at?

I'm trying to get a mesh+skeleton into Stellaris. I seem to have run into the problem described earlier, where parts of the skeleton snaps to zero.

Without exporting the skeleton, it looks fine ingame, although there's no animation of course.

I copied the skeleton from human_female_01.mesh after converting it to .dae with Jorodox tools. I was hoping I could reuse the animations, since I literally just started using Maya a few days ago, on a trial at that.

I created three new meshes, then textured them.

Then I moved the face skeleton around a bit, and it looked good enough.

Then I entered rigging mode, went to the Skin->Bind option, and applied after setting max influences=4. It exports and all dandy, but I can see in Jorodox tools preview that the skeleton is messed up. Ingame, it moves around weirdly and is completely deformed. (should it even move without me creating any animations?)

I'm at a loss. I don't understand why the skeleton changes after I export it. Even if I delete the joints, so that nothing snaps, it still deforms anyway. Could anyone take a look?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3wkDzGxlbsVQmtkRHNZS3VBUG8/view