Can somebody please tell me about Blender's rigging and animation work flow. Are there special and certain way to do things in order to get animated model out to md5 files?
Thanks.

There are many ways to animate in Blender. But the most common way is using Armature/Bones.

There are vast amount of tutorials on rigging a model for animation. And few few on the actual animating.

The 2 common way to animate are FK(Forward Kinematic) & IK(Inverse Kinematics).

Most .md5 exporters I have used support the 2 different ways, however using the FK to animate will most likely cause less problems when it comes to exporting to the .md5 format.

It has been a while since I used a .md5 exporter so this could have all changed.

For md5mesh output, you need to use armature animation. It does not matter which IK setup you use to help with animation, as it is anyways *not* exported to the md5mesh file. You can setup an IK to help design your animation, but depending on your IK setup you might need to bake the animation before exporting it.

The workflow is pretty simple, you make your armature, parent it to your triangulated mesh, you name the bones, most importantly the origin bone as the reference for the game engine. You can automatically assign, name and apply weights for skin deformation and you can then edit the weight with weight painting. You animate, you bake the animation, sometimes you need to bake the scaling, rotations, etc and you can then use ton's exporter to generate the md5mesh. I then usually manally asign the materials by editing the md5mesh.

The simplest thing to get started is probably to first import a Doom3 mesh (with ton's importer), examine it, modify it, or generate a new animation, and then to use the exporter and test the results in the game engine. It's pretty straightforward.

Ic.. thanks for advice. Another question.. Do you animate with IK or FK? Cos I imagine it would take a while to animate walk cycle with FK

Whatever way is best for you. I find FK being easier to animate with but can give a more unrealistic movement if your not carefull.

IK is abit harder to rigg up, but can give more fluent animation. But if your not carefull will end up with some weird results.

Hellborg, what do you mean when you say, "you bake the animation, sometimes you need to bake the scaling, rotations, etc". I've been tinkering with getting animated meshes from blender into D3 for quite a while and have never been successful. I've never heard of baking an animation before and I'm wondering if this is the long lost solution to my problems. At any rate, please expound.

Thanks,

Johnny

I must admit that I have been exporting animated mesh from Blender to MD5 files with constant success.
Also I don't bake anything and I use IK for legs.
What kind of problems do you guys have? Maybe I can help somehow.

Depending on what your doing there is 2 kinds of baking.

One is changing physic calculations to an IPO curve.

The other is filling in the blanks of an animation with actual points.

You don't have to bake animation for the exporter since version 0.94

changelog wrote:

# 0.94 2006-02-09: modified for Blender2.41,
# uses Pose-module (enables export of ik without baking to IPO)

Johnny, if you describe your export problems or maybe put up a link to your .blend files that don't seem to work, I'll gladly try to help.

Can somebody please tell me about Blender's rigging and animation work flow. Are there special and certain way to do things in order to get animated model out to md5 files?
Thanks.

There are many ways to animate in Blender. But the most common way is using Armature/Bones.

There are vast amount of tutorials on rigging a model for animation. And few few on the actual animating.

The 2 common way to animate are FK(Forward Kinematic) & IK(Inverse Kinematics).

Most .md5 exporters I have used support the 2 different ways, however using the FK to animate will most likely cause less problems when it comes to exporting to the .md5 format.

It has been a while since I used a .md5 exporter so this could have all changed.

For md5mesh output, you need to use armature animation. It does not matter which IK setup you use to help with animation, as it is anyways *not* exported to the md5mesh file. You can setup an IK to help design your animation, but depending on your IK setup you might need to bake the animation before exporting it.

The workflow is pretty simple, you make your armature, parent it to your triangulated mesh, you name the bones, most importantly the origin bone as the reference for the game engine. You can automatically assign, name and apply weights for skin deformation and you can then edit the weight with weight painting. You animate, you bake the animation, sometimes you need to bake the scaling, rotations, etc and you can then use ton's exporter to generate the md5mesh. I then usually manally asign the materials by editing the md5mesh.

The simplest thing to get started is probably to first import a Doom3 mesh (with ton's importer), examine it, modify it, or generate a new animation, and then to use the exporter and test the results in the game engine. It's pretty straightforward.

Ic.. thanks for advice. Another question.. Do you animate with IK or FK? Cos I imagine it would take a while to animate walk cycle with FK

Whatever way is best for you. I find FK being easier to animate with but can give a more unrealistic movement if your not carefull.

IK is abit harder to rigg up, but can give more fluent animation. But if your not carefull will end up with some weird results.

Hellborg, what do you mean when you say, "you bake the animation, sometimes you need to bake the scaling, rotations, etc". I've been tinkering with getting animated meshes from blender into D3 for quite a while and have never been successful. I've never heard of baking an animation before and I'm wondering if this is the long lost solution to my problems. At any rate, please expound.

Thanks,

Johnny

I must admit that I have been exporting animated mesh from Blender to MD5 files with constant success.
Also I don't bake anything and I use IK for legs.
What kind of problems do you guys have? Maybe I can help somehow.

Depending on what your doing there is 2 kinds of baking.

One is changing physic calculations to an IPO curve.

The other is filling in the blanks of an animation with actual points.

You don't have to bake animation for the exporter since version 0.94

changelog wrote:

# 0.94 2006-02-09: modified for Blender2.41,
# uses Pose-module (enables export of ik without baking to IPO)

Johnny, if you describe your export problems or maybe put up a link to your .blend files that don't seem to work, I'll gladly try to help.

Can somebody please tell me about Blender's rigging and animation work flow. Are there special and certain way to do things in order to get animated model out to md5 files?
Thanks.

There are many ways to animate in Blender. But the most common way is using Armature/Bones.

There are vast amount of tutorials on rigging a model for animation. And few few on the actual animating.

The 2 common way to animate are FK(Forward Kinematic) & IK(Inverse Kinematics).

Most .md5 exporters I have used support the 2 different ways, however using the FK to animate will most likely cause less problems when it comes to exporting to the .md5 format.

It has been a while since I used a .md5 exporter so this could have all changed.

For md5mesh output, you need to use armature animation. It does not matter which IK setup you use to help with animation, as it is anyways *not* exported to the md5mesh file. You can setup an IK to help design your animation, but depending on your IK setup you might need to bake the animation before exporting it.

The workflow is pretty simple, you make your armature, parent it to your triangulated mesh, you name the bones, most importantly the origin bone as the reference for the game engine. You can automatically assign, name and apply weights for skin deformation and you can then edit the weight with weight painting. You animate, you bake the animation, sometimes you need to bake the scaling, rotations, etc and you can then use ton's exporter to generate the md5mesh. I then usually manally asign the materials by editing the md5mesh.

The simplest thing to get started is probably to first import a Doom3 mesh (with ton's importer), examine it, modify it, or generate a new animation, and then to use the exporter and test the results in the game engine. It's pretty straightforward.

Ic.. thanks for advice. Another question.. Do you animate with IK or FK? Cos I imagine it would take a while to animate walk cycle with FK

Whatever way is best for you. I find FK being easier to animate with but can give a more unrealistic movement if your not carefull.

IK is abit harder to rigg up, but can give more fluent animation. But if your not carefull will end up with some weird results.

Hellborg, what do you mean when you say, "you bake the animation, sometimes you need to bake the scaling, rotations, etc". I've been tinkering with getting animated meshes from blender into D3 for quite a while and have never been successful. I've never heard of baking an animation before and I'm wondering if this is the long lost solution to my problems. At any rate, please expound.

Thanks,

Johnny

I must admit that I have been exporting animated mesh from Blender to MD5 files with constant success.
Also I don't bake anything and I use IK for legs.
What kind of problems do you guys have? Maybe I can help somehow.

Depending on what your doing there is 2 kinds of baking.

One is changing physic calculations to an IPO curve.

The other is filling in the blanks of an animation with actual points.

You don't have to bake animation for the exporter since version 0.94

changelog wrote:

# 0.94 2006-02-09: modified for Blender2.41,
# uses Pose-module (enables export of ik without baking to IPO)

Johnny, if you describe your export problems or maybe put up a link to your .blend files that don't seem to work, I'll gladly try to help.