question about how to fix bones

[Rigel]

So after having some difficulty with milkshape, I tried finding a different way to model things for blockland, and stumbled upon a page of our own wiki (forgot we had that)! There was an image of a TF2 turret in Blockland with the caption "Modelled in SketchUp, post-processed in Milkshape 3d, and rendered in Blender" I'm curious as to how one would go about processing a SketchUp model through those two other programs.

[Ad Bot]

[Conan]

you can go sketchup to blender directly by exporting as an .stl or .obj and importing into blender. you will have to clean up your model a lot as the way sketchup handles vertices and faces is a lot messier than it needs to be, and can skyrocket the facecount for especially complex models

[Rigel]

you will have to clean up your model a lot as the way sketchup handles vertices and faces is a lot messier than it needs to be, and can skyrocket the facecount for especially complex models

Yeah, no kidding.

Now to figure out how another 3d program works.

[Conan]

thats not that bad actually

[Rigel]

thats not that bad actually

There's like 50 faces in that one small square

[phflack]

that's probably because it's a curve

[Conan]

its easier than you think it is to fix lol, but i guess it comes with practice. use edge dissolve, edge split, dissolve faces, and other such things to cut back

[Rigel]

yeah, after spending 20 minutes trying to find out what tools to use and where to find them, I finally cleaned it up, and it really wasn't that much work. Still so much better than milkshape, though.
edit: I have run into... other issues...


It'd certainly help if that blender addons tutorial that we have didn't have dead links to its images, but I don't get the problem of the model's size. The Blender tutorial mentioned that the minifig's hands are 3x3 small squares, but this sounds like outdated information now, since Blender only has big squares. That hand seen in the screenshot I forgot to remove, but it was supposed to be a reference for the size and handle. When I made a model in milkshape, that hand was the perfect size. I actually had to scale up the original model to fit the hand in blender.

The missing sides and gun being backwards I can already guess on how to fix, but there's another issue, maybe. That gun in the background is supposed to be on a brick that's to my right in the picture. In the blender model, the bone of the mesh is far off the grid for whatever reason, and I've got no clue as to how to fix that. The muzzle flash and bullet still comes out of my hand, though.

[Conan]

i should really do part 3 of my modeling course cause i was gonna go into exporting and stuff there and it would tell you exactly how to handle the problem you have here. unfortunately im tied up recoding prison break.

you have to apply location/rotation/scale on the model in object mode after scaling it to scale to the model on this topic.

as for the missing faces those are just inverted - turn on display normals in the N window while in edit mode (sub-pane that pops up when you press n while mouse is hovering over the 3d view) and then find the faces and use shading/uv > invert normals. Or if your model is generally connected (vertices/faces are connected in the most part) you can just select all with A and hit recalculate normals.

[Rigel]

CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+C is a funny shortcut, but it reset the origin, not bone, to where it should be. I fixed the normals, and my screwy shading by setting it to flat for the faces. I rotated the gun around, and scaled it down to fit into a minifig's hands. Now, it's just a bit out of place, it's too far to the left and forward of the hand. Another problem I'm having is the fact that the muzzleflash and projectile is coming out of my hand. Also the case isn't ejecting, but that's probably a problem in the script. Just to clarify, I have mountPoint on the handle, muzzlePoint in the barrel, and ejectPoint a little bit out of that side hole. Is the narrow end of the bone supposed to point anywhere? Right now I have them all pointing toward the front of the gun.

Thank you for all the help so far, Conan. It's been really useful.

[Conan]

you need to use named empties not bones. ports exporter doesn't currently support bones

[Rigel]

you need to use named empties not bones. ports exporter doesn't currently support bones

oh, so that other tutorial is really outdated, then.

[Conan]

oh, so that other tutorial is really outdated, then.

that one is for blender 2.49b, not blender 2.7#

there are still times when you should use the old blender, namely specifically playertypes and vertex animations, neither of which you are doing here