VR_Dev

Thanks as always man. Don't quote me but it should be standing on its own tonight, with animated parts. Tail opens but doesn't move back and forth yet.

So I'm building this. Now that's the model as a whole. I'm currently breaking it up, texturing it, and coding the .cfgs. The simple animations are currently being controlled with moduleAnimateGeneric, but I need a more complex plugin for the legs. Just a couple questions for people with more c# experience then me. This is where I am currently The hip joint is pretty much just an IR disk washer. My guess is that IR part rotates 360 degrees and is looped, and somehow the IR plugin controls the motion and limits. So I made my joint in that fashion. There is also a rotation in the knee, that has limits, but that probably has to be designed like the joint above. My real question is if there is a way to get the IR plugin to run my parts. I figured I could just name my animations the same thing as the IR animation names, and trick IR into running it. But I looked through the IR plugin code and it's way beyond me. We also have code to make it walk that needs to be converted to c#. I'm just looking for any advice you guys might be able to give. Here is the development post

Well I finally got the damn nodes figured out. All the parts attach via correctly placed nodes now so it no longer explodes on launch. I also animated the hip joint to rotate and tilt up and down. Next is finishing the leg then the tail. I still have to figure out separate animations for one part for the tail, so if you know how to do that in blender please let me know. I don't really have any time to work on this today. So if someone wants to be super helpful you could download the IR plugin source code here, pop it open, and try and find what the name of the animations are for the parts. Somewhere in there it must call "open" or "move" or "default take". Or something like that. If I could name my animations the same thing the IR plugin could control my parts, which would be super helpful, at least for testing.

smce, I really really appreciate the detailed explanation. I'm spending way to much time on this thing because I want to see it done so badely. So thanks a lot for taking the time to type that out. That seems like a pretty genius way to do it. And I will defiently give that a try after the way I'm trying it now. I'm at work so I can't post the thread I've been using but appartenly in blender there is a way to add an additional, seperate keyframe timeline to a part. I worked on it briefly this morning to no avail. So if anyone knows anything about that, it would be incredibly useful to me. From my experiece you can name animations in unity. Under the animation tab my part says "Default Take" is the name of the animation, as that is what blender called it automatically. If you change that to what you want, hit enter, then apply the animation name is whatever you want. "Open mouth" is what my head's animation is called.

Thanks a lot stoland. The head animation is relatively straight forward. The legs and tail are much more complicated. I explain why in the main post I just updated

It's fcking sweet I think. I'll update the main post with whats next. Does anyone know how to have two separate animations in blender?

Lights!

Animation vid coming soon hopefully. It's super close. I will now be able to animate all the parts and it shouldn't take very long. The head involved learning everything. Now I'm good to go

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/76334-Joined-Parts-in-Blender-Animation-Question?p=1087212#post1087212 Post regarding my current animation dilemma

This was mentioned in the sticky post above but pieces(technically mesh? I don't know terms really I'm like brand new to blender/all of this). anyway pieces that are "joined" together will load from blender to unity but not into kerbal. Well I have this part here, and the only way to get it to animate is to join several pieces. Loaded into kerbal, most pieces load. But not all. Once again maybe mesh is the right word I was just wondering if any progress has been made regarding this issue, or if any workarounds have been found. Or if you have a suggestion to animate it that doesn't involve joining pieces. As you can see here, I select the cylinder behind the head and set the origin to its center. Then I animate that cylinder rotating in its fixed position. Then I attach the whole upper jaw to that cylinder so that the whole thing opens in regards to the cylinders origin. Thanks for checking this out and literally any feedback would be appreciated. I did not design the model, that was deviantart user DGMM. I'm just trying to put the thing in the game. The mod post can be found here

Has anything been discovered as how to get around the group break?

It'll look better. Thats only 24 fps. Also it's looped horribly. Thats like a cycle and a half

So I learned how to animate in blender. Problem is this involves having the pieces grouped into the cannon, neck, upper and lower jaw. However, as blackheart and I discovered, the parts have to be loaded into sketchup and exploded into individual pieces before ksp will load it correctly. Exploding it would probably ruin the animations however. But I can't test this theory because sketchup doesn't import .fbx files, and from what I understand, thats the format needed to load animations from blender to unity. Its always two steps forward, a step and half back with this thing. blackheart I'll be kicking it in the modder chat all night if you see this

straight bummpin. So about mirrorRefAxis. The three numbers are assumably x,y,z. but what does the -1,0,1 values mean in those positions? There is truly nothing on the web about this code, and the only part I can find it used in is a pair of wings. And whats the difference between mirrorRefAxis and mirrorAxis I might right up a new post for the code. The forums could use a thread for this useful code Til this get figured out I'll be teaching myself animations, so that'll be fun

I had a whole guinness left, and I really wanted to get those arms on there. No robotics in the elbow yet. Now I'm really off to bed

I lied. Arms, now its unstoppable. inverted however

wouldn't the colliders be the same if its the same part, just reflected? and I haven't written the nodes correctly yet. It's just placed radially on the surface of the rotator. I'm hitting the sack to ponder it over. I'll hit you up tomorrow sometime blackheart

I finally got my hands on a model and google university taught my blender, sketchup, and unity. Looks pretty good if I do say so myself. blackheart was a huge help too. And yeah thanks blackheart, the measuring had me confused. But you can measure things in sketchup, which is crazy. I'm pretty sure you told me that too though. My brain is just fried learning all this stuff in like 2 days and working the am shift ksp sleep deprived. As for where I'm at now.. completely stuck until this mirrorRefAxis thing gets figured out. mirrorRefAxis 0,0,-1 works just fine right here. But the upper leg needs to rotate clockwise like 20 more degrees. But as soon as I shift+rotate it once past this point they reverse. I have no idea why, and like I said my brain is fried from going at this like 3 days straight. I've tried a lot of combos of -1, 0, and 1, but there's a lot more. Maybe after a solid break it will make sense to me. Theres also mirrorAxis, and mirrorVector to try. And if it works on the upperleg, that doesn't guarantee the same code will work on the middle or lower leg. Like I said, stuck

Nevermind. Sketchup is the sh t. This took forever though, and its about 60% done. As least it will look badass

Man, there is a mind boggling amount of stuff to do. I've resized it and it's looking good. That mirrorRefAxis code has a mind of its own. Some combinations work for some parts but not others. Then sometimes they load the way I want until you rotate it past a certain point and then it just snaps to something else. It's just trial and error at this point. I'll get it eventually. Turns out, as anyone who knows anything about textures knew already, the parts are too complicated to texture all at once. So I'm gonna break off the armor. As you can see there is a body under the armor. Now the armor is far less complicated. So I can give those pieces real nice, detailed textures in blender and just render the whole under body black. It should turn out pretty decent. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas to ensure the armor gets attached in the exact same place it's placed on the completed model. Instead of just free eyeing it. Also they're aren't any really detailed instructions out there about the node attach code. I'm trying to figure out how to get attachment nodes where I want them. None of my parts are uniform or symmetrical. I want to place them in weird places too. Like on the upper leg where the hip will attach. If someone knows of a thread that has these explained well please share. Maybe those could be used to ensure proper armor placement as well?

Here's what i got. Updates will continue here http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/73364-Walking-Flying-Custom-Replica-Mech-Mod

Updated the main post

yeah well lucky guess, pics here in a second

that code works but it's screwy. As you can see from the feet it only lets me aim them two directions. I can toggle them around in a circle but they just go back and forth between pointing towards each other and backwards. Google brings up for links when I search that code. I need to know what the 0, 0, -1 entail edit: I just changed the first number to 1 and it worked.

Hell. Yes. blackheart you saved my ass again. I was just apart to start breaking the other leg into pieces. Which was gonna be a real pain in the ass and require more parts loaded into the game. That bit of code needs to be much more publicized. I couldn't find it anywhere