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Topic Started: Feb 15 2014, 07:38 AM (241,636 Views)
HENDRIX
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Export is more or less done. It should pretty much work the same way it used to do.
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HENDRIX
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I've ported the BF importer. Some bones don't work properly, likely because of faulty roll calculations. Not sure if there is any way to fix these...
Edited by HENDRIX, May 12 2015, 07:59 AM.
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HENDRIX
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Apparently that's only responsible for some bones' distortions; when I disable the fancy skeleton display, everything works perfectly except one bone that is likely in some stupid polar orientation or something like that. So I assume something is wrong in the extra matrix system, but I'm not completely sure what...

I've begun working on the exporter, and boy, that's a tough one! It was a nose-to-the-grindstone job to get it export only keyframes like the old one used to do, because this was apparently never done before with the 'new' API. The usual approach is simply to loop over all frames and export every frame for all bones - that's of course far from efficient. I've got the keyframes extraction done, it just has to be integrated into the exporter framework.
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HENDRIX
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Yay the BF exporter works! :D Doesn't have much resemblance to the original Niftools code anymore but it does the trick... :P The overall framework is now there - obviously it still needs some fixes in places, but the real work is done.
Edited by HENDRIX, May 15 2015, 06:42 AM.
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Bill
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originally, one_piece

that's great news! with this we can almost completely move on to 2.74!

you can consider this just a suggestion, do you think it would be too hard to make a simple nif importer? we wouldn't need nif exporter anymore thanks to the bfb, but most of the animals in zt2 still comes in nif files, so to use them, one will have to import it in blender 2.49 then open the file in 2.74 (that's the only way i can think of, don't know if the data will still be read correctly though). so with a nif importe for 2.74, 2.49 will be completely obsolete.
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HENDRIX
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Well the Niftools people have a NIF importer in the works, so I don't see the point in me making another one. :P I'm not totally sure, but I think it can already at the very least import models - I haven't looked into it yet. Here's their developer build: https://github.com/niftools/blender_nif_plugin (I'm not totally sure but I think you also need pyffi for python 3 and possibly a complete python 3 installation as well, as the new blender is built with python 3...)

In any case, you can always do the workaround and import a NIF into 2.49b and open the blend file with 2.74+.

NIF is a much, much more complex format than BFB - even if only NIFs from ZT2 were to be supported, there'd already be a lot more elements to consider than BFB.

Something I'd consider a lot more useful is for example an importer / exporter for ZT2 psys particles, or maybe models for JPOG. These are the kind of projects I'd tackle if I had more time, because all these ideas certainly take a lot more time than porting scripts I made and know very well.
Edited by HENDRIX, May 15 2015, 08:07 AM.
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HENDRIX
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I've written a small lookup algorithm that goes over all Z2F files, finds the entity XMLs and builds a tree to select them from. It doesn't extract all the stuff, only looks - therefore it's really fast AND it doesn't depend on a library like Zoozanne.

It still needs a badlist to exclude abstract objects (parsing every XML to check for that would definitely take too long), and a filter so it only takes animal main XMLs and no adult, young, etc subcategories.

Posted Image

This is the first step in building some kind of real APE2 that works just like the original did, and can be used to clone anything you have currently installed in ZT2.

Then after a source is selected, you would specify the codename, the program would gather all the files by parsing the selected XMLs and finally clone them into a temp folder.

Oh and this time it's in python 3.4, so UTF-8 shouldn't cause trouble anymore :D
Edited by HENDRIX, Jun 16 2015, 08:39 AM.
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HENDRIX
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I've updated the BFB script so it does not rely on correction matrices anymore. Instead, the rotation is directly calculated from a blender bone matrix without any inbetween steps. This should make custom skeletons and animations a lot easier later on. But first, the animation system has to be updated to work with these. Note that only the new branch is being developed. The old one should maintain compatibility with the old NIF scripts. Once it's polished up, I'll try to get the niftools people to implement my new method into the new NIF scripts so they are compatible again.
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HENDRIX
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Animation import works perfectly now, in all cases, without correction matrices but with good-looking bones!

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Export is next!
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godsaurus
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so what is the stegosaurus for? because like I'm really curious about what your using it for. edit never mind it was just an example your were showing us.
Edited by godsaurus, Jun 20 2015, 04:08 PM.
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HENDRIX
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Export works as well!

Exactly.
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HENDRIX
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The animation system has been further improved, batch anim import has been added and harlequinz ego is decoding more key types for me to implement.
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HENDRIX
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Anim export fixed, keyframe inter- and extrapolation added.
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Bill
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That moment when your works are too advanced, people dont even know how to appreciate it x)

But seriously, i could never praise you enough for what you are doing for the zt2 community. Keep up the miracle work guys.
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HENDRIX
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Yeah, the technical stuff can be really hard to understand.
But with the current scripts it is possible to import any anim set, make any changes you want and put it straight back ingame without having to worry about anything.

Linear scale support added; albeit limited to [0 - 5.1] due to file format restrictions, it is better than nothing.
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