Did someone manage to export any animation with custom skeleton?

[K-vald]

I believe that something must appear in "Select animations to export" in plugin window when it comes to correct export. Although, no matter what I do, animation selection box is always empty. Its in Paradox style, really.

You need to have the root joint with the animations in the scene root. If you have the root joint in a group it won't work. Please try to move it or describe how your scene looks!

 

[SaintDaveUK]

I would also appreciate a more thorough tutorial for this (portrait modding in particular). I've followed it all the way through to the Maya section (so, just the art part ), but I get hung up on both the creating the skeleton bit that they mention so off-handedly, and then following that how to assign the texture to the diffuse channel of the Phong shader. I suspect I'll get hung up on further steps, too, so a more in-depth tutorial would be excellent. Haven't found any in my travels, yet! If I find any, I'll link them here.

Yeah the tutorial is definitely more aimed at people already experienced with Maya. I plan to go through it and make it more understandable for non-Maya natives.

 

[SaintDaveUK]

Maybe this is a strange question, however, how did you get the "Animation" attribute in the Graph? When I set the keys, I get only attributes like rotate, scale, etc.

Select your 'root' bone and click 'Add Animation Attr' in the exporter. You can then add states to the Animation Attribute by going into menu bar Modify - > Edit Attributes. It can then be animated just the same as rotate and scale.

 

[K-vald]

Nope, it is not working. The plugin gives an error "line 136: Found no animations to add". I wrote about this below, just thought that the Animation attribute in the https://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/168932/Mayascreen0A.jpg goes from Maya, not from the plugin.

They come from the plugin where you specify "animations" in the clausewitz.txt file found in Documents and Settings/Paradox Interactive/PdxExporter/clausewitz.txt.

I still have little success having it appear in game though. The problem still lies in incorrect entry within 00_species_classes.txt and 00_potrait.txt entries that I added in.
Or the problem could be from which X Y Z axis the mesh should've been facing in Maya as the front.

Would appreciate if someone can share their entries in those .txt files to make it work!

I have been checking your files pretty thoroughly, and I finally got it to work! The .txt files worked fine, but what made it invisible was something to do with the mesh planes in Maya. They had a lot of history left, but deleting it with "delete history" didn't work, however what did work was to create a new mesh. So there's probably something in those meshes that's messing the scene up in some way. You can try to just delete them and create some new quick meshes to test it. Then if it works you can model them into the meshes you want.

 

[SaintDaveUK]

Wow looks amazing!

 

[K-vald]

I want to add a UV offset in my animation but I can't get it to work. Exporting animation files works so far, except this attribute.
Tried it manually via tweaking the UV position and keying the frames and driven keys via the joints.
Am I only allowed to change the xyz position, scaling and rotation? This is for ships but I guess there is not much difference between portraits and ships.
I've seen uv_animation_speed and uv_animation_direction in the \gfx\models\ships\extra_dimensional_01\_extra_dimensional_entities.asset file and thought it might be possible at least.

I'm not quite sure what exactly you mean with a UV offset, but if you mean a UV animation you need to have a certain shader for those parts called "PdxMeshAlphaAdditiveAnimateUV". This will however also be an alpha additive shader with a static alpha channel, if you want a moving alpha channel the shader is "PdxMeshAlphaAdditiveAnimateUVAlpha".

This can however cause problems if you have it in the same scene as other meshes with other shaders, so to prevent this you need to attach them in script. So basically you need to create two different entities and attach them with the attribute "attach" (see below). Then to actually animate it you add the "game_data" attribute in the entity that has the animateUV shader.

attach = { root = "animated_UV_entity" }

game_data = {
uv_animation_speed = 0.25
uv_animation_direction = { 0.0 -1.0 }
}

 

[K-vald]

Thank you! I will try these shaders.
The UV offset is indeed meant as an animation, being, some parts of a mesh change the uv coordinates on a trigger from position A to B.
Is there by chance a list of shaders or a possibility to generate one in the console?

I see! I can't come up with a way of doing that by using animated UVs, but if you figure it out it would be interesting to know.

Creating your own shaders is somewhat hard, but if you want to give it a shot you can find the shaders in gfx/FX/pdxmesh.shader (open with text editor such as Notepad++).
You can either use the ones there or copy/create your own. Altohugh, after you have created your own shader you need to add an "effect" for the materials used in it and can be found at the bottom of the file mentioned above.

 

[K-vald]

[text]

What I can find from your files is that you appear to have double animation attribute input. The animation is both in your _animation.asset file and also in the _entities.asset file. Not sure if this can be the problem however, but worth trying to remove one of them, otherwise I think it appears to look correct.

Can you take a screenshot of your exporter settings?

Disregard the previewer, it will have some trouble finding the textures problably.

What happens if you create a new simple rig with just one or two joints?