Multiple Root Joints In Mesh Rig But Why ?
polycounter lvl 18
First of all, apologies for what you are about to read. Im in no way an animator, so if I get any terminology wrong, blame the fact I cant learn ANOTHER thing over night lol 
Ok, so as you may know, Im working on an indie title called OverDose, and we have our first person arms and pistol set up and animated. It should be working fine, aside from one issue It wont work in the engine. See the engine requires that the first person arms be set up a certain way so that we can use blend channels on them. Its pretty basic stuff, however when we get the mesh ingame and test the animation, it dumps out on us
Now the problem comes from the fact the mesh has THREE root points. But when we look at the mesh, we cant for the life of us see why. Its very annoying because we have a shit load of animations already completed for this thing, and hopefully its a simple fix, but we just cant see where.
Heres the model file with a test animation. Its already compiled, so you will need a .md5mesh importer for Max etc, but I can look into getting the .max scene file for you if thats no use.
http://www.team-blur-games.com/odium/FPS_Arms_Issue.zip
Opening the .md5Mesh file will show you that there are more than one root, as you can tell by the multiple -1 joints there. There should only be a single one for this to work in the engine.
Any advice, however small, would be HUGE. Because we spent a good few hours on this last night and we feel the answer is about as basic as it gets, we just cant see it.
Cheers lads and lasses.
Ok, so as you may know, Im working on an indie title called OverDose, and we have our first person arms and pistol set up and animated. It should be working fine, aside from one issue It wont work in the engine. See the engine requires that the first person arms be set up a certain way so that we can use blend channels on them. Its pretty basic stuff, however when we get the mesh ingame and test the animation, it dumps out on us
Now the problem comes from the fact the mesh has THREE root points. But when we look at the mesh, we cant for the life of us see why. Its very annoying because we have a shit load of animations already completed for this thing, and hopefully its a simple fix, but we just cant see where.
Heres the model file with a test animation. Its already compiled, so you will need a .md5mesh importer for Max etc, but I can look into getting the .max scene file for you if thats no use.
http://www.team-blur-games.com/odium/FPS_Arms_Issue.zip
Opening the .md5Mesh file will show you that there are more than one root, as you can tell by the multiple -1 joints there. There should only be a single one for this to work in the engine.
Any advice, however small, would be HUGE. Because we spent a good few hours on this last night and we feel the answer is about as basic as it gets, we just cant see it.
Cheers lads and lasses.
Replies
http://www.katsbits.com/tools/
I've parented CATRigLArmCollarbone and CATRigRArmCollarbone to Origin and I only have one root when i re-import.
It takes a shitload of time to export though.
Could you be a darling and send me that file you exported? It may give me some hint as to how much of a dingbat we are being.
Really i did nothing special, just parenting in max. Might be trouble with exporter ?
But as it's just a text file, if you replace the extras -1 with 0 to redefine the parenting level, shouldn't it work ?
Thanks mate.