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[megaerathia]

Hey, I've just started using WallWorm recently and I've come across a few issues.

I'm not very experienced with rigging or animating in 3ds max in general, but I've followed enough tutorials (Including the official ones) to know the general grasp.

For my first problem:

Models I create generally are masked half by shadow or appear nearly completely black on certain parts of the map.
I've tried playing with the Illumination origin > scaling and moving it up and forward a lot, enabling $ambientboost didn't have much of an effect either.

For my second problem:

I've been creating ragdolls, setting up my own bone system. Whether the next problem is 3ds max related or if I'm supposed to do something specific with the wall worm tools I'm not sure. If I create a bone seperately from the root bone and attach it to an other bone it spazzes all out in game. I've tried playing with the IK rotation limits and for some reason for some bones at 0 rotation it takes a near 180 rotation in account. As in the bone would be backwards or slightly rotated from its original position.

It results in some hilarious issues:
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/262724394828085603/43AD50A62897F0E83D2564C88A282978D6764F17/

This is Garry's mod I'm exporting to. I'm not sure if a screenshot would be that helpful in my situation, but some pointers or hints would be helpful to say the least.

[wallworm]

Thanks for posting.

It's hard to tell specific causes of lighting issues without access to files.

Here is one of the most common solutions: Change the WWMT Normal setting to Explicit Normals in the exporter. By default, WW has the Normal method set to Auto--but it cannot detect explicit normals unless there is an edit normals modifier applied to an object. Generally this scenario effects imported models (SMD, FBX, etc). The Explicit normals setting is not on by default because it is slower than using face smoothing group normals... which more people use than explicit normals especially if you are creating models from scratch.

Hint: Scaling the illumination origin node does nothing useful--and I can expect that it can only cause problems. In fact, scaling itself is generally a bad thing. In terms of the models, if you must scale, make sure the global setting to Ignore Scale on Mesh is on (in global settings > Models).

As for the ragdoll issue... I am not really sure what is going on. But I'm wondering why you are creating a new bone? Can you not just use the bones the model already has? If there is already a hierarchy and if there are already skin weights, then breaking that hierarchy can have many unwanted consequences.

As for the rotation... that is possibly caused by the new bones and their orientations. Hard to say. Another possible issue is the WWMT Setting for Rotated Origin. Turn that off when making animated props or props with a hierarchy of bones (it's generally intended for use with $staticprop models).

EDIT: One more thing regarding scaling and bad normals. Very often bad things happen from scaling, including to the normals. Read this document if nothing above helps: My Model Scale is Wrong.

That's pretty much all the time I have to answer right now. Hopefully it helps.

[megaerathia]

Hello, thank you for your reply.

Both models are made completely from scratch, the first one was mainly created from splines and some additional poly modelling so it could explain the lighting issues. I had to flip the polygons around also to get the expected result, I'll attempt to export it using "Explicit normals" after messing around with the normals. I had already tried resetting the Xform of the model, bearing no result so I'm a little lost.

As for the bone structure I meant more that I created a few connected bones starting from the head to the tail (It's a bird), and I created two additional (seperate) bones for the beak. The rotational limits for the beak bones at 0 are rotated by 180 degrees in the viewport (So just flipped around). Could it be that I'd have to use a different rotational controller? It's not only for the beak bones but it's most noticeable for these.



Could it also be that the vertices are just too close to each other? I got a warning a few times related to bones being more narrow than 0,5mm, I don't recall the exact message but It vanished after a second time exporting.



Another thing is that the model spawns rotated 90 degrees on the Y axis (Facing down), could this be related to any of the bones or is this something about the exporter itself? I tried checking "Rotate origin", but that messed up all of the bones and it spawned under ground. Mind you I haven't set any rotational limits on any of the bound due to the positions they appear at with the setting at 0.

[wallworm]

Based off of what you are saying, it seems to me that the model should just work. But it's hard to troubleshoot things sometimes without the file. You can click File > Save As ... Archive and email me the resulting ZIP. I'll try to make some time to look at it.

[megaerathia]

Based off of what you are saying, it seems to me that the model should just work. But it's hard to troubleshoot things sometimes without the file. You can click File > Save As ... Archive and email me the resulting ZIP. I'll try to make some time to look at it.

Heh, well the models do appear in game, whether they function as should is questionable. The beak appears either rotated inwards to the model or shifted through other bones, it gets removed by engine or starts spazzing out. Setting the IK limits didn't really do much for me, I've sent the files to you either way.

[wallworm]

OK, I will look at it as soon as I can. Probably not tonight, though as I'm beat from a family excursion.