XSI viewmodels

[cat]

I want to animate custom viewmodels in XSI.


1. This site says the following:

In this example, the shotgun and arms have been modeled and textured separately (it is necessary to step into the world of imagination and pretend that this example is textured). View model weapons need to consist of a single mesh, which requires merging both the shotgun and arm meshes together while keeping the texture coordinates intact. Do to this, merge the arm mesh into the scene File > Merge, next, under the Model panel select Poly Mesh > Merge. A dialog box will then pop up (shown below). Generally the tolerance should be set to 0. The tolerance will weld verts that are close to each other. The higher the tolerance number, the more verts will be welded together. This is handy when stitching two models together, such as modeling one side of an object, duplicating and mirroring it and then welding it back to the original. For this example, however, none of the hand verts should be welded to any of the weapon verts. Click the All button to merge all materials and texture coordinates into a new single mesh.

If I do this, I would have to select the different model parts of the weapon to rig them, which is not cool.


what is the most efficient way to evade this problem?

 

[clarky003]

Well in max you set each seperate piece you want to animate apart so you can rigg them to a bone easily, so make the weapon as one mesh, select peices of the mesh that are animated seperately (eg. shotgun , the hand, the cocking mechanisim, and the shell) move it into a clear area not too far away and remember the value its been moved from its normal origin, when its all in place rigg it.

Then you can move the bones to the correct origin for the weapon to be back together again and you don't have any awkward rigging issues.

It should work very similar in XSI

 

[cat]

selecting the pieces after merge won't do cause XSI throws away the cluster after merge.


Is there another way? They really have to be 1 mesh? I saw a tutorial for an animated prop and it was separate objects.

oh and btw


I do have a modeled weapon (pistol, all parts are separate objects). Now I want to attach it to the V-hands supplied by the sdk. When I import the reference smd for the v_hands and attach the pistol (whole group) to lets say the forearm bone (via envelope - then click on a bone) the whole group gets attached (at least it looks like - all vertices of waepon turn blue and moving the arm also moves the weapon. However when exporting to smd I get the following error:

"ERROR invalid SMD Enveloped mesh doesn't ha.... (rest is not in view)


When I open the screwed smd file the bones are moved into the postion before the export. However the v_hands are back in their "ref" position and the handgun has dissapeared.


A tutorial from valve about viewmodels states that the weapon and v_hands should be in one mesh (which is not cool cause of having to fish for the corrct polys for rigging)

 

[cat]

small update

I have now opened the scene file for the SDK models (instead of the smds). Does this mke a difference? The scn files have extra animation controls (I think they are this). However therwe are 2 more problems

1. How to add my weapon model into this scene? XSI mod tool has some export formats blocked (hey there should be a way- its the official mod tool for hl2)

2. If I merge any new object with the hands they loose the connection to the rig