Maya/Blender SMD exporting woes

Makkon

I grabbed Blender for the sole sake of exporting SMDs so I could get models into HL2. But... it doesn't appear to work. I get an error saying:

And I'm pretty dang sure that a mesh was, in fact, selected. I don't know what an armature is.

Similarly, Maya is giving me just as much trouble. When I try to export an SMD using Prall's SMD exporter, I get this message:

Error: Cannot find procedure "vss".

Anyone know how to fix either of these? Or are there any other alternatives to exporting SMDs?

EDIT:
Max's SMD exporter is no better. It exports an empty SMD, making it impossible to compile.

EDIT:
All three 3d assets are producing the same results, exporting all the files as empty SMDs with no geometry. All that remains in the file is a single bone.

leilei

Try Dragonlord's SMD exporter. He knows what he's doing and doesn't develop it blindly. No skeleton/animation support yet though

Also, make sure EVERY vert has a valid bind to a valid bone, if there's any unbound it will panic. This is true for every SMD exporter.

Makkon

So I have to have a bone in the first place!? I hadn't any clue. Does the Phys model need a separate bone, or can it share the same bone as the primary mesh? Thanks for your help, I had no idea that the models required a bone, there was no information like that anywhere.
I'll give Dragonlord's SMD exporter a try.

Quasar

I've used MAX for exporting SMD files many times and haven't had the issue. Any chance I can see your max file? I think Cheap might be onto something with the vertex weighting, though max should assign weights to all the verts

EDIT: Yes, you need at least one bone to export and you must weight your model to it as well as your collision geometry. Would also like to point out that you do not need to weight your collision geometry to all of your bones, you can weight it to a few and it will only export those bones with the geo, this is particularly useful for optimizing your ragdoll model.

Richard Kain

I love Blender. However, the SMD format has always been a bit tricky. I'd strongly recommend using the officially supported XSI mod tool for exporting SMDs. It's free to download, it comes with skeleton templates and a lot of character-specific tools, and it uses the same SMD exporter that Valve uses.