Blender exporter 4.2

[JCPalmer]

Updated Blender exporters have been released introducing Blender Actions support via AnimationRanges.  The documentation has been updated, here.  Below are excerpts, as screen prints since markdown does not display here very well.

As far as any known future plans, Tower Of Babel is probably going to drop Typescript file generation.  I put that in a while back, and now think it would be simpler to always generate a '.js' and a '.d.ts', then giving the user a choice of a '.js' and / or a '.ts' file.  Up until now, most of my use of the exporter has been testing upgrades to it.  I have not been using the typescript output during testing, cause it is an extra step.

I think as soon as the QueuedInterpolation extension is done, my game production will begin, and do not see much further changes needed.  Anyone else can add whatever they want, and possibly PR it, of course

[gryff]

From the docs

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Inverse Kinematics Friendly- There is a custom exporter property (on Scene tab), Ignore IK Bones. The effect is any bone with .ik in the name will not be exported. Any extra bones that are needed to make inverse kinematics work will never make it to BJS. So now you can do all your posing for your key frames more easily in Blender, without the baggage following you to BJS.

Jeff, I have stayed away from using IK in my BJS experiments as they often add quite a few bones to control the IK - the "baggage" as you call it - so it will be interesting to try this and some of the additional animation functionality.

And let me say Jeff, you have done a great job on building the exporter for Blender - I've had very, very few problems with it over the last two years.

cheers, gryff

 

[GameMonetize]

This is excellent! Thank you very much JCP!

[JCPalmer]

Talking most to Gryff, but I am in development of a IK game rig for MakeHuman MX2, see.  Actually modified script to create rig, but still investigating issues & seeing if there is any appetite  to put it in the main branch, or only in a fork I make.

[gryff]

Jeff, I looked at the picture of the rig you posted at the MH forum (your link above) - no IK for the legs in your plans?

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seeing if there is any appetite  to put it in the main branch

Personally Jeff, I would go for the main branch.

cheers, gryff

[JCPalmer]

As far as main branch, there is a reason it is call a "Pull Request".  Not much I can do if the author is not interested.

I played the massive 276 bone MHX2 IK rig, and it pretty much posed with ease.  Here, I just made sure any bone with IK in the name did not get removed.  Have so many things to work on, have not played to see if this is sufficient after enabling the IK.  Here is Blend, if you wish to play.

Their forum is far sleepier, so thought would put out that thread then go work on something else.

[gryff]

Jeff, I took a look at the .blend file you linked too. Wonder what I am supposed to be seeing. It loads with the armature in edit mode and ten bones selected. Each of these selected bones has "ik" in its name - hipik.L, hipik.R etc. But they are not IK bones- they are linked normally to the armature with a parent bone and are not applying a constraint to a bone or chain of bones.  (They are however set to not deform any mesh.)

So what am I supposed to be seeing? The view in the 3D window looks just like the picture you posted on the MH forum.

cheers, gryff

[JCPalmer]

It was just the .blend for making the picture in the other forum post.  It was script built in MHX2 with meta-data changes by me. 

I had also started working on a script which would take skeleton's pose library and convert it to shape keys on the mesh.  This was to create shape keys for fingers.  Like everything, it is just another thing that also most works.

Have decided that I really need to just finish some stuff.  Skeletons are on hold.  Working on speech till it is far closer to DONE.  Just got the pacing right.  My mistake was assigning the entire duration for a given phoneme in the phoneme itself.  So a word like P-U-T, would have a very short P, a long U, and very short T.  This would make mouth open & then chop shut suddenly.  Inner word phonemes durations are now spread between the phoneme and the next phoneme, so that the maximum opening is actually in the middle.  Made a huge difference.

[dudicious]

HI, first post here!  Just wanted to say that I tested the Blender Actions export feature with 2.3 and it works AMAZING!  Thanks so much for this feature.

Also, thanks to all of the veterans here who have made my life so much easier.  This may be my first post but I've spent hours here troubleshooting, and the community has never failed me yet.