Problems with skeleton in blender?

[darth rexie]

I'm new to modding and have been working really hard on a player model in blender 2.64 for about a month (had to use 2.64 because I couldn't get the 2.79+ plugin to work, not sure why). So far, it's been going great and I've been able to figure everything out. I've got my model how I want it to look but there's a couple of problems....First of all, every time I try to set the parent object of some of the objects, they just seem to disappear???? Why would this happen???? Second of all, whenever I try to export my model, I get a weird message: "could not load surface l_arm_0 from blender: could not load a vertex: could not retrieve vertex bone weights: l_arm_0 has no armature modifier". What does this mean and how do I fix it? I'm so confused about weight painting, rigging, animations, gla, etc...help would be appreciated. 

[Ramikad]

Most likely, the parented objects don't disappear, but are moved and scaled around the place: one way you could minimize the issue is to apply location, rotation and scale of the object (CTRL + A that way, when you parent it to another object, for example a part of a base model, it will take on the location, rotation and scale of the parent object - in the aforementioned case of the base model part, it will be scaled to 1/10th of its size. You can then just scale it back (S 10) and apply object scale (CTRL + A).

As for the other problem, make sure that the newly added objects all have a name under Ghoul 2 Properties (in the Object menu), that they all have an Armature Modifier (in the Modifiers menu) named skin and with the skeleton_root armature set as Object, and that the object is properly weighted (which you can verify in Vertex Groups under Data). Basically, the gist of weighting is that you want to link each vertex of the added model part to the bone you want it to move with. You can either do it manually, by entering Edit Mode, selecting the vertexes and assigning them to a specific vertex group (which you can do in Vertex Groups under Data), or you can select the object, enter Weight Paint mode, select a specific vertex group and paint over the object. Vertex groups are named after the bones of the model skeleton: if there isn't any in Vertex Groups, you can simply add them, making sure that the names are correct.

When exporting you want to make sure that every vertex is weighted - a good test of this would be to select the skeleton_root, enter Pose Mode, then select all the bones (A) and move them around. If everything is weighted there will be no vertexes warped towards the origin. Also make sure that you're in Object Mode, not Edit Mode, I seem to remember it turned up a lot of errors when I tried it once.

 

[darth rexie]

7 hours ago, Ramikad said:

Most likely, the parented objects don't disappear, but are moved and scaled around the place: one way you could minimize the issue is to apply location, rotation and scale of the object (CTRL + A that way, when you parent it to another object, for example a part of a base model, it will take on the location, rotation and scale of the parent object - in the aforementioned case of the base model part, it will be scaled to 1/10th of its size. You can then just scale it back (S 10) and apply object scale (CTRL + A).

As for the other problem, make sure that the newly added objects all have a name under Ghoul 2 Properties (in the Object menu), that they all have an Armature Modifier (in the Modifiers menu) named skin and with the skeleton_root armature set as Object, and that the object is properly weighted (which you can verify in Vertex Groups under Data). Basically, the gist of weighting is that you want to link each vertex of the added model part to the bone you want it to move with. You can either do it manually, by entering Edit Mode, selecting the vertexes and assigning them to a specific vertex group (which you can do in Vertex Groups under Data), or you can select the object, enter Weight Paint mode, select a specific vertex group and paint over the object. Vertex groups are named after the bones of the model skeleton: if there isn't any in Vertex Groups, you can simply add them, making sure that the names are correct.

When exporting you want to make sure that every vertex is weighted - a good test of this would be to select the skeleton_root, enter Pose Mode, then select all the bones (A) and move them around. If everything is weighted there will be no vertexes warped towards the origin. Also make sure that you're in Object Mode, not Edit Mode, I seem to remember it turned up a lot of errors when I tried it once.

 

This was so helpful, thank you!