Rigging 3D Models

[Galaxy_Stranger]

Is there any difference in rigging characters vs. vehicles? All of the rigging tutorials I find are based on humanoid characters.

[Zanieon]

For anything other than humanoid you have to do the skeleton yourself, make a autorig and fix the weird parts manually depending what is.

For vehicles is pretty simple you just rig per object since vehicles works with objects that don't have to stretch.
e.g: A Jeep, you just rig the main body to a unique bone then the wheels to child bones of the suspension ones that is child of the root bone which holds the entire Jeep's body.

[Galaxy_Stranger]

Thanks.

[Galaxy_Stranger]

Hey, I'm making Landing Gear. For the .md3 format, does the landing gear need to be a part of one big fuselage model, or can each of these bits be separate objects when I export?

[Zanieon]

Due to MD3 limitations of 4 models to composite a object (established defaults of id Tech 3 itself), GZDoom iherits this and you can only define 4 models at once per actor, this is expensive to sync frames in MODELDEF, but however the best thing is you just save everyine as a single model but with everything in separated groups, that way you will not reach any limitation the MD3 format have.

[Nash]

Be aware of this bug with multiple models in GZDoom: http://forum.drdteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=6629

[Galaxy_Stranger]

Oh, I'm not talking about multiple models in the modeldef. In Blender, I've got the model all made up. Then, I created new landing gear meshes in the scene. At this point, I can attach the meshes to bones, OR I can join them to the fuselage and attach those vertices to bones. Basically, my question is when I export, am I only going to export the selected mesh or can I leave the landing gear as separate meshes? I don't want to add new landing gear models to the modeldef for this.

[Zanieon]

Blender exports everything selected as one model, you can separate those by exporting each one by selecting them individually, if you only select the vehicle, then you will get only the car as MD3 and the landing gear will remain only in Blender.

If you want everything at a single model then just select all ("A" Key) and export it.

[Galaxy_Stranger]

Ok, fantastic - I can leave the individual pieces as separate meshes, rig and animate them, and then just be sure to export with all meshes selected.

[Nash]

If you want to leave your objects as separate objects, assigning textures in MODELDEF won't work if each object is meant to use a different texture. The only way to assign textures this way is to rename each object's material to the path of the texture. Path is relative to the PK3 directory structure. For example, the wheel object's material would be named "models/my car/wheel.png", the car's body would have a material named "models/my car/body.png" etc. The MD3 exporter will convert material names to MD3 texture paths.

[Galaxy_Stranger]

Oh, no - all of the meshes will be exported in the same model. I'm not doing any texture swapping or anything. Maybe I'll try that out later.