ArmaRig for Blender

[Arctor 1]

Sweet! Thanks for your help, it's a little clearer now. I'm sure everything you describe still applies in Arma 3

and with your blender rig and the A3 samples as examples I should be able to work it out for my stuff.

Good to know I'll probably be able to deviate from the standard man skeleton for my more... irregular creatures.

I'm pretty sure fixing up my own bone config entries won't be a problem and once I have one animation it shouldn't

be hard to repeat the process and give my model more possibilities.

I'm excited. I'll report back in once I have something moving! Could be a while though because I'm learning

as I go haha.

[Macser 776]

You're welcome.And good luck.If it gets a bit tedious then take a break and come back to it.

But keep going.It's a great thing to see your own work in action.And even more so to have other

people get enjoyment out of using it. :)

[Arctor 1]

Hey Maczer. I finally got around to try my hand at ArmaRig with Alwarren's Blender toolbox, starting with a simple handanim for a weapon. I keep running into some weird issues and I was hoping you could point me in the right direction to solve them.

On my first attempt I imported the 1 lod of my model and pasted it over the weapon reference object. I followed your video tutorial, exported the rtm and tried it out. This was the rather weird result:

Weapon handanim test 1

Next, in order to investigate, I tried exporting the standard jesus-pose with only a transformation in the weapon reference object (moving the weapon along x and y to roughly fit right hand). That resulted in this:

Weapon handanim test 2

If you have any thoughts on what would cause such an offset or what I might be doing wrong, much appreciated. I already did about 10 tests trying different things but the offset seems to keep re-occurring.

Also, how would you export to rtm when you only use IK controllers to deform the armature? I was under the impression all "@" prefixed elements in dopesheet were disregarded... If all @-elements are disregarded all that's left is the weapon transform in the dopesheet :confused:

Thanks in advance

Edited January 13, 2015 by Arctor

[Macser 776]

Hello Arctor.I'll try the last part first. :)

If I understand correctly you're wondering how the control bones can manipulate

the mesh yet be disregarded at export time.Yes?

If so,it's because the actual deformation bones are on a different Armature layer.

You'll find these have no @ prefix.As these bones are part of an ik chain the controls

are the only thing you really need to see while animating.You can of course make them

visible by switching the layer on,in the armature tab.

Ok.The hand animations.

I confess I haven't done much in the way of experimentation with hand anims.

From what I can see it's more likely an issue with the hand anims themselves.

By that I mean how they're configured.Rather than the rtms.

I say that because it looks like both anims are off by the same amount,relative

to the character model.But I can still see that the pose itself appears intact.

Particularly in the second image.

I can't tell you off-hand how to sort that out.But I don't believe that's the first

time I've seen this happen.There must be a thread dealing with just such a situation.

One other thing.If you bring in another object,for reference,make sure you parent it

with the appropriate bone.Otherwise you're just moving a disconnected object around the

viewport.Select the object then the appropriate bone,while holding shift.With the selection

made hit CTRL-P and choose "Bone".The object should now follow that bone.

Edited January 13, 2015 by Maczer

[von knudenberg 0]

Hello,

At first I would like to thank you, Maczer, for your great and very valuable tool. It's really easy to use and allows very quick creation (and fine tuning) of static animations aomong other things. One banana, ten points and one manly hug for you!

As for Arctor's handanim problem. By the looks of it, I would say it is binarization problem i.e your handanim.rtm doesn't get binarized properly. This causes your character to reenact Monty Python's Find the Fish sketch. To fix this problem, you could try the following steps:

1. Put a model.cfg in the same folder with your handanim.rtms

2. Define your handanim.rtms in the model.cfg

3. Pack and binarize using BinPbo

I've uploaded a sample model.cfg and two handanims here: http://1drv.ms/1FWfpZB

You can open the model.cfg, scroll down and see how the *.rtm (or multiple rtms) are defined there.

If it still fails, you can try and take out *.rtm from BinPbo's List of files to copy directly.

If it still fails, you could read and follow these steps marked down by Mickyleitor here: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?181457-Help-with-custom-HandAnimation&p=2747663&viewfull=1#post2747663

In any case, let me know so we can make it to work for you. It seems there are some differences depending on what tools are being used. Steps I've described work for me.

Edited January 14, 2015 by Von Knudenberg

[Macser 776]

Thanks Von Knudenberg,for the compliment and advice/help.Much appreciated. :)

I'm glad to see yet another person getting some use out of the files.Although I think I may need to

update them again.

I can't use Blender's default naming conventions for all of the bones.By that I mean leftarm.l,or leftarm.r.

Which would allow the user to mirror poses accurately across the x axis.Very handy.Especially for looped walk/run cycles.

The engine requires the correct bone/selection names for the default animations to work.

I'll have to experiment and see if renaming the controllers would be enough.It's not a deal breaker.

But it might be nice to have.

[Arctor 1]

Wow, thanks so much guys. This animation stuff is kind of a lot to take in (but all the more exciting to figure out!) so I much appreciate the help.

I'll try again as soon as possible with this all in mind and update when I get it right.

Von Knudenberg: This might actually be the problem. I was just using pbo-manager to fix me up pbos for test-runs so it's likely the binarizing didn't occur correctly in the rtm's. In my next attempts I'll properly use addonbuilder :)

[Väyrynen 1]

Is there anyway to make the gun follow the red squre longer in Y-axis. When I am trying to put gun more away from the body gun just starts to move on to right and up?

[Macser 776]

Sorry for the late reply.  :)

 

Which "red square" are you talking about? By default, the weapon bone is parented to the right hand.

So if you move the right hand the weapon will continue to follow it. Even if you keyframe the weapon bone.

The parent bone's transforms are still affecting the child bone.

 

What kind of animation are you trying to do? Does it involve the weapon moving independently of the main rig?

If so, you can change the parenting of the weapon bone to none, for that animation, then switch it back for general work.

 

This can be a little fiddly for a big project. So i usually have 2 separate blend files. 1 for rifle anims( weapon parented to right hand). 1 for pistol.( Rifle parented to upper torso). Without this I would have to switch the parenting depending on the animation. Very tedious once you get past 50 or so sequences.

 

I think a more flexible setup for prop type bones, like weapons, is to give them no parent. Then apply either a childof constraint, or copy location/rotation. Depending on the animation you can switch the target.

 

Of course this is best done before you start animating. Trying to change this halfway through a set, would be

.....Painful. :)

[PuFu 4600]

hey Macser, just started fidling with this rig, awesome job all around (it is more difficult to me to navigate since i am not a blender user by default). Quick question, any reason why the weapon bone is not exported as RTM (using arma toolbox together with your gi)...? 

 

edit: found the issue, the selection sets are case sensitive, the "weapon" is defined with lower caps, while the selection in blender is "Weapon"...hence the problem. renaming it does the trick

[Macser 776]

Hey Pufu.

 

Thanks.

 

It's not perfect. But I think it'll get anyone who's interested, off the ground. 

 

The case sensitivity caught me out once or twice too. I was working off the A3 sample character.

The version I have uses upper case for "Weapon". So that's what I went with. :)

 

I hope you get some use out of it. 

 

 

If for some reason anyone wants to add extra control bones, always make sure to prefix them with @.

 

As in: @bonename.

 

Al's exporter will know to disregard it on export. There's no point in having redundant bones in the rtm for the engine to process.

[PuFu 4600]

Hey Pufu.

 

Thanks.

 

It's not perfect. But I think it'll get anyone who's interested, off the ground. 

 

The case sensitivity caught me out once or twice too. I was working off the A3 sample character.

The version I have uses upper case for "Weapon". So that's what I went with. :)

 

I hope you get some use out of it. 

 

 

If for some reason anyone wants to add extra control bones, always make sure to prefix them with @.

 

As in: @bonename.

 

Al's exporter will know to disregard it on export. There's no point in having redundant bones in the rtm for the engine to process.

Hey Macser, cheers for the quick reply. Just making sure this went out properly from my part: very much appreciated, i can surely change a name of a object in whatever software out there, even if it is not my primary modelling tool, so it wasn't a "fix" request from your part.

 

But since i wasted about 2h trying to figure it out, i though i would be nice to post in the parent thread that so that if anyone else finds that the weapon bone is not exported, he should simply change the name (all A3 characters have "weapon" instead of "Weapon" defined), so it might happen more often than not.

 

Best regards

[Macser 776]

No problem. I didn't realise the naming was different. :)

 

I'll put that into the first post. Thanks for the info.

[Kydoimos 916]

Hi there, Macser! Just wanted to say thanks so much for your hard work on the Arma Rig - I love it and use it loads! So much of the stuff I do, I couldn't do without this important feature - thanks, man!

[Macser 776]

You're welcome. I'm glad to see people using it. :)

 

And I hope it encourages modders to get into an area that's often overlooked. 

[andy1 71]

After a bit of searching I found this and thank you for putting it out there.  I am trying to do a couple of custom reload animations for UGLs and obviously the static holding animations as well.  I was hoping you'd be able to advise as to the best way for me to get rid of the weapons that you have in the model at present and how to change them out for the ones I have.  Cheers.

[Macser 776]

Hello andy,

 

I've been asked the same question a few times now. But I'm not really in the mood to do a big post with images. So I'll record a small video describing the process. I'll put the link into the first post.

 :)

[andy1 71]

Thanks very much, I think I have managed to do it with a bit of playing around, but as you've said yourself if you have had a few people ask probably best to make a video to not get any more.

[Macser 776]

Don't get me wrong. I welcome questions. It's just at the moment a video made more sense. :)

 

If you don't watch the video, I'll mention one thing. The meshes are there for reference only. Moving them around is not advised, as it will likely give you a false impression of where they'll be in the RTM. Only use the bones when animating. That's why I switched out the ability to select them. That and the fact it can be fiddly trying to select a bone. Sometimes the meshes get selected unintentionally.

 

Of course make sure you parent your mesh to the weapon bone. Check the first post regarding naming of the weapon bone, if you're working with A3.

[andy1 71]

I watched it and it makes huge sense thanks again.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[andy1 71]

Just want to say thanks again, using you're tool has meant that I have had a really productive 2 days.  I've made a custom hand animation, and two reload animations.  So you're tool really does help loads.

[Macser 776]

You're welcome. :)

 

I'm just glad to see another modder getting some use out of it. 

[road runner 4344]

nice couple of video's mate, very soft accent too, and video's easy to follow.

[Macser 776]

Thank you. I hope you can get something useful out of it. It's not as tricky as it looks. I haven't done anything regarding the configuration side of things. But there's quite a few posts about hand animations on the boards. Where problems cropped up and were resolved. So do some digging if you run into trouble. I think that's the area most likely to cause stumbling. :)

[Guest]

Could you maybe be so kind to check the archive you have linked on the first page? I am getting some viruswarnings on the archive which prevents me from openeing it (although I suspect it to be a false positive). If you do not mind that is :)