UT2004 Weapon placement problem

Mooseboy

I have a custom model with a custom rig. Many weapons are placed nicely at the weapon bone, but others are not. Examples of correctly placed weapons are rocket launcher, mine layer, lightning gun, grenade launcher, and mini gun. Guns which are *not* in the right place are bio rifle, enforcer, and link gun. (I haven't tested all guns.)

Tweaking the translation values on the weapon bone affects all guns, so I can't fix one without screwing up the ones that work.

Any ideas?

Slyrr

I noted this early in UT2004's release last year, and have pestered EPIC about it regularly for some time now. The weapon alignment for the OLD weapons, ported over from UT2003 (rocket launcher, flak cannon, etc.) are placed properly.
But the NEW weapons, like the updated link gun, shock rifle, AVRIL, etc. are not place right. They're too high and too far in for some reason.

I think it has something to do with the SIZE of the model when you export it from your 3d program into UED. Somehow it causes distortion and displacement.
I think the solution be be to shrink (or expand) your model before exporting, and possibly minimize the distortion. But don't quote me on that because I'm not sure.

All I know is I tried everything to get EPIC to come up with a reason and an answer for this. I begged, pleaded, grumbled, whined and even employed heavy sarcasm. Nothing worked, and to date I don't think they've even tried to find the cause, unless they posted an answer somewhere and just didn't announce it.

Your only hope, alas, is to fix your model size (as I am only guessing this is the cause), or do what you can in your current weapon placement to minimize the distortion in game and make it not so obvious.

Check the readme file towards the end of any one of my models for UT2004 (bender, raptor, Junkmech,) and you'll read a lengthy complaint about this very matter in the "bugs and issues" section.

This may or may not help you - but at least you know you're not alone. Models that use UT2004's default humanoid properties don't seem to have this issue. So if you can link your model to one of the UT default skeleton animations, you should be OK....

Slyrr

Mooseboy

I'd suspected that size was an issue. When exporting out of Maya PLE 5 the mesh scale was set to 10 on all axes. (The dimensions I started with seemed OK based on the modelling VTM which came with UT2004, yet it still needed the scaling factor.) So before starting this thread, I tried scaling the model up so that the scale factor would be 1. I exported, and the plugin still set the scale to 10. (Perhaps I need to delete history? The mesh is scaled, but I rebuilt the rig.) Anyway, I set the scale back down to 1 and it was sized properly.

However, the weapons didn't even show. The animation is minimal 'cause I just want this simple test, and I mapped the righthand to a bone in the head area. The idea with that was to put it somewhere closer to the origin hoping against hope that that some part of the misplacement would be reduced and I'd be able to get more of a clue about what factors influence the problem.

I'll try again with a "real" bone weapon.

I have all those models, and over the course of this project have spent a lot of time examining them in ued as I try to figure out what's crucial to the process and where I can add my own features. However, I never looked at the readme. Sounds like that's next!

I appreciate the moral support. Linking to one of the default models is not what I want to do with this - I've done that already, and I want to go to the next step. All the bots I play against are the ones with some extra character and imagination - yours, Magdalena, Effigy, Monsta, etc, and that's the kind of thing I'm trying to do with this project. At this point, I think the gun issue is all that's keeping me from finishing the model off. I've proof-of-concepted everything else I want to do with it.

Slyrr

Yeah, the model size definitely has something to do with it, as I have now found out to my cost.
I made my newest model, Farnsworth, by making him about HALF as big as I made my other models, hoping that shrinking him would fix the displacement with the new weapon meshes in Unreal200X.

But alas, with the smaller model, the distortion is now worse than ever. All the orginal weapon meshes from UT2003 are still placed OK, but the new meshes, (Avril, Mine layer, grenade launcher, link gun, etc) are now WAY out there in space.

So it would seem the solution is to make your model BIGGER than normal, though I can't swear to it without experimenting, and I'm not sure I'm ready to throw away all the work I've done of Farnsworth just yet.

Keep an eye on it...

Slyrr

Mooseboy

What I figure is there's some base offset vector for the weapons that is applied *before* the mesh scaling factor is applied. So when the scaling factor "normalizes" the model, the translation vector is normalized along with it.

Some of the Epic models have a scale factor of 0.3 or so. I wonder...about how far away from Farnsworth are the weapons? Presumably your scale factor is about 2, but if the weapons are as far out as they are with my model with a scale of 10, then it may be more of a threshold/limited range thing instead of simple multiplier.

HumanFemaleA : 0.44
HumanMaleA : 0.39
Aliens: 0.40
Effigy: 0.45
Magdalena: 0.45
Neofin: 0.36
Bender, Junkyard: 1.0

I think I'll try something closer to 0.40. It'll have to wait until tonight, after work...

Mooseboy

Success!

I scaled my model up in Maya so that after exporting and setting the mesh scale to .4 (the plugin set it to 10) all weapons are in the bone hand. And it gets better: the Santa hat mutator works as well.

So now all I have to do is
- replace the temp rig with the real one
- weight the verts
- tune the UVs
- finish the texture
- animate
- figure out how to use the karma authoring tool
- figure out how to record sounds
- figure out how to edit them into a voice pack
- figure out what I've forgotten to put on the list and do that, too

Nothin' to it!

Slyrr

Well, you're a bit farther along than I am in some ways. My mesh is already linked to a skeleton and animated. And the way my 3D suite (3dmax) works, you can't scale up the mesh and skeleton and the same time. And if you try to scale up one or the other - well, let's just say the results aren't pretty.

So only option would probably be to throw the skeletal assignments in the trash and start all over, risking incompatiblity once I'm done, and risking having to start animating all over again.

Or once again, just tell people who dload the new model to 'live with it' until EPIC fixes this with a patch. On a related theme, this blurb was shared in the beyondunreal forums when I asked about the same thing...

"I shouldn't worry about it too much, it's an epic problem with their attachment classes for the new weapons. Normally weapons are imported inverted on the z axis for 3rd person models, which works perfectly. But for some bizarre reason epic decided to import all their new 3rd person models the correct way up and then used locational offset values in the script classes to invert the weapon in game (because they would appear upside in game if they're imported the right way up in Ued; I know, confusing and not very logical).

Epic have admitted themselves that they have no idea why this happens to some models, but hopefully they'll fix it in a patch when they find the cause...."

Of course, given the game has been out for over a year and they haven't done a dang thing about it, they probably won't bother now. Still it's nice to know it's not our fault...

Slyrr