Hi,

If I have separate visible layers, each one containing a different LOD mesh, will export work properly?

I always export individually since that's the only thing that works...

SMD is textual and human readable :)
Can't go wrong with that in my book.

The mesh had an object-level translation applied or something (as viewed in object properties). So although blender was displaying animations properly, the SMD tools could not.

Hi,

I have a mesh with armature in blender, that is distorted when I export it and view it in hlmv. For example, I made an idle animation, and while it looks fine in Blender, in HLMV, the arms are stretched way out to the side. If I view the reference position in HLMV, the arms are normal.

I double checked that the mesh was parented to the armature in reference pose, and I also double checked that the arm bones are properly parented/connected.

In addition to the arms being stretched out: If I check the "bones" checkbox on the render tab of HLMV, the entire armature appears to be below the mesh on the Z axis... Of course, in Blender the armature is properly positioned.

Any ideas?

i can't just move the root.. i'd have to parent the IK bones to root or something. Wouldn't that break IK?

Selecting all bones and moving them is the slow way of doing it. Because of IK bones, you can't just interpolate start/end frames as a translation using this method--You end up having to LocRot keyframe all bones in each keyframe--then calculating the proper translation distance for each of them...

How would you transfer object-mode translations to a bone in pose mode? I tried keyframing on LocRot, VisualLocRot, and I even tried just copy/paste, but none of these things worked. Also, if translation is only applied to root-bones, IK bones will not follow since they're not parented to any bones on the armature--This would be bad.

The object-mode translation really cut down on animation time for me, it would be an awesome feature for a future release.

I made a few player rigs this week successfully, but I've had weird issues with the walk animation in HLMV with the last one, while in Blender the animations look fine. Here's what I did differently:

Instead of manually moving the model in the X/Y plane each frame to simulate a walking motion, I created in-place walking animations in pose mode, then I entered object mode for the armature, and created a Location keyframe at the first/last frame of the walking animation.

In Blender, this appears to work fine, but when I view the compiled model in HLMV, the walk animation had big problems (bones are scaling each frame, they disconnect from each other, etc).

Here's some more info:
- I didn't use Scale keyframes anywhere (I searched through all actions I export)
- Other exported animations work fine, but others don't use this object-mode movement technique

Any thoughts or suggestions? How do people do walking animations in Blender for Source?

batboy, where are you stuck?