Ah, so in the end it was a bug. I'm just glad to find out that I haven't gone completely insane yet.

Thanks Arfunkel. Excellent work. I am just getting started in this and I chose Blender specifically because the overall quality of your exporter.

ah sorry, I copied my update over from facepunch (crosspost, sorry) where revzin had already talked about how to get the phonemes and such.

I'm pretty stoked that I got this far. Thanks SO MUCH for your help!

And thanks for the info about maybe having to rotate the ref.

Success! So, downgrading to source smd tools 1.10.2 didn't *fix* my problem, but what it did was actually provide a warning during export that 1.10.3 did not. It warned me "WARNING: warning implicit motionless bone is pushing head=zero.dmx over the weight link limit"

Which lead me to google this error, which lead me to: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/...rce_Tools_Help

Which in turn lead me to disable the option "Implicit Motionless bone" in Blender. The model exported, compiled, loaded in SFM, has eyes, has facial morphs, and animated correctly (at least on initial impression) with the built-in sequences.

I know it's the same *thing* you (and stdiomdl) were trying to say, but searching for those phrasings weren't returning any results. The way it was worded in the blender export warning led me to the answer.

Why didn't it give me that warning? The only warning it was giving me before was about flex "PuffLips" not being defined.

The only things left to do at this point are get the emotions and phonemes tabs back (which you described above) and fix his orientation. (setting $upaxis turns him on his side, instead of standing him up, for some reason).

I got a copy of 1.10.2 from someone on the open source filmmaker chat. I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks for the help.

Aha! I am vindicated! Thanks for your work.

I'm not crazy. There is something up with the importer/exporter in the current release. Maybe I should recreate this in bugs, since this is a standard Valve model, it should be pretty much "baseline" It should work with no hitches. This isn't a random model I recompiled from Garry's Mod. This is the source model that ships with SFM.

Which leads me back to my original question, do you (or anyone reading this) have 1.10.2 still lying around? I really need to go back to the last-known working copy of the plugin.

Thanks. It's good to know that it can be compiled, but if I need to make any changes to the file (like for some reason he is lying down in SFM when imported) *I* still can't compile it. Did you do anything different to get it compiling?

I'd still really like to get an older version of the plugin, because that worked *for me*. I can't believe they don't have an archive :( Can someone please provide me with some older versions of the plugin? I have tried it on both 2.66a and 2.69 with the same issues.

Okay, it's spine3 causing this problem. Once I remove spine 3, it will compile. Of course, then his head isn't attached to his body when I import him in SFM.

Woops, I gave you the wrong files. Here are the blend files...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1922411/out_again.zip

EDIT: I sort of got it working, but with some weird problems.

I removed most of the bones in his body except his head. He compiled and loaded, though the body doesn't look quite as good as the original model... more shadows around the armpits for some reason.

Oh and his head isn't attached to his body, lol. When I rotate him at the pelvis his head stays behind. Maybe I just need to leave a bit more bone structure.

Sure, I can send you the files if you're willing to give it a shot:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1922411/aperture_scout.zip

So, what I have going on in there.

Basically I'm just trying to get a full hardware morph head onto the cool concept scout's body.

head=zero.dmx is the official Valve scout head. I removed the body and exported it.
scout_morphs_low.dmx.001.dmx is the concept scout's body, with the head removed.

In the QC I merge this things together. There are still some files in this directory that I'm not using.

Before upgrading to the latest exporter, I had no problem exporting this exact code. I was having entirely different issues, caused by a bug in a specific version of blender. (discussed at length in the facepunch thread).

I compiled it with the SFM studiomdl: \Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\SourceFilmmaker\game\bin\

This was compiling fine (but with the UV problem) before I upgraded the plugin. Now I can't even compile. My QC is here:

https://gist.github.com/tofarley/7924998

I was having a long discussion about this on facepunch with revzin. He was trying to hepl me get around the UV mapping issue... I decided to upgrade and I deleted my old plugin. Do you happen to have an older copy of the plugin? This version is not working for me at all, and I let blender delete the one that worked :(

Discussion:
http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1332475