Helper objects as bones in a character

Hey all,

I have rigged a character, and here is a screen grab of the rig :



As you can see, I have a bone setup for most of the rig. The rings around the character are just control points for rotation. When exported, everythign works fine except for the face area, which as you can see, uses mostly helper objects as bones. The helper objects are skinned and they have vertices assigned to them to allow for facial animation. Below is a screen grab of what happens when the model is viewed in LEXIView. (I have tested this within Ogre itself as well, and I have the same results)



All the helper objects are linked to the top control "ring", so that when I rotate the head, the helpers stay with it.

Any ideas what I could be doing wrong? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Is this the only animation applied to the character (or other pose or skel animations)?

Are you using the phy mod or the skin mod?

Sorry! I should have included that info.

It is just one skeletal animation cycle - no pose and no morph animation.
I am using skin.

-Bartek

Review if probably those vertices are affected by more than 4 bones with non usable weights, or they have a few bones but with 0 weights

On Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:27:35 -0700

For reference, the solution for will be copied here:


The issue in your scene was identified

When adding extra bones (or helpers) to the skeletal hierarchy is important to add them with a "clean" matrix to avoid any possbile issues from the internal handling that max uses (internally several different matrices can be used)

To clean the matrix, the faster method is to reset the xform from the object (bone or helpers) "before" adding it to the skel hierarchy

As in your scene the helpers are currently animated and part of the skel hierarchy, the solution is to reset the internal transform that is causing the incorrect blended vertices (a scale in the "HELPER_Head" object)

This are the steps to correct your scene:

Open the "Petey_Rigged92" scene
Select the "HELPER_Head" object
Select the "Hierarchy" Tab
Click the "Scale" button from the "Reset" group of the "Adjust Transform" rollup
Update the "Petey" object in the preview viewport or export your scene

The animated character will be correctly displayed and exported and can be used in your application





The "HELPER_Head" object is the "ring like" helper around the neck that is displayed in the images, part of the skel hierarchy, used to move the complete character's head