genMesh animation tutorial

Hello. This is my first post but I have been playing with crystal space and blender for a while now. I normally try to figure stuff out myself so the solutions I offer may not be the "best" way.

I have noticed allot of people having issues with genmesh and getting blender armature animations to work. I had some of the same issues at first and it works beautifully for me now just exporting using the default settings and no changes except one minor tweak.

What I noticed was that when I generated my world folder, either only one animation would play or it would not play at all. I was debugging and trying to find out what was going on. What I found is that all of the animations you list will be exported fine in the armature file. However, they do not seem to be attached to the meshfactory file. I believe this is either the result of a bug in the version of blender2crystal, or it is an non-intuitive user interface issue.

If you just want to export genmesh armature animtations you can export them directly. Just select the bone object and be sure you list all of the actions you want to be exported. Unfortunately only the first action will be linked to the meshfactory. To solve this what I did was I opened the meshfactory file and you will see something like this:

<bone>22</bone>
<bone>1</bone>
</use_bones>
<run script="walk"/>
</animcontrol>

It exported the "walk" action fine but the other actions are not listed. If you try to use the skeleton api to access the other actions then you will get a null object for them and the program will crash.

to resolve this issue (not sure if this is the best way, but it is a quick fix)

add you other actions to the meshfactory file like this

<bone>22</bone>
<bone>1</bone>
</use_bones>
<run script="walk"/>
<run script="anotheraction1"/>
<run script="anotheraction2"/>
<run script="anotheretc"/>
</animcontrol>

by linking these actions in the meshfactory file they will now be accessible programatically through the skeleton interface functions.

Here is some sample code which loads two animations programattically and changes what animation is playing:

use this at your own risk

csRef<iMeshWrapper> lara=Engine->FindMeshObject("larabod"); // create a meshwrapper for the mesh named "larabod"

//query for the generalmeshstate interface required in order to get the skeleton object
   csRef<iGeneralMeshState> genmesh_state (scfQueryInterface<iGeneralMeshState> (lara->GetMeshObject()));

//create an animcontrol object also necessary for working with iSkeleton
   csRef<iGenMeshSkeletonControlState> animcontrol ( scfQueryInterface<iGenMeshSkeletonControlState> ( genmesh_state->GetAnimationControl ()));

//create the actual skeleton object
   iSkeleton* skeleton = animcontrol->GetSkeleton ();

// stop any animtations currently playing
   skeleton->ClearPendingAnimations();

//get a pointer to the walk animation
   csRef<iSkeletonAnimation> walkanim=skeleton->FindAnimation("walk");
   walkanim->SetLoop(true); //optional depending on if you want it to loop

   anim2=skeleton->FindAnimation("someotheranimation");

rinse and repeat. Take a look at the iSkeleton, and iSkeletonAnimation api list for more control. Essentially you should have complete control of your skeleton and animations without using cal3d. I have been impressed with the results. The playback is identical to what I expected.

Feel free to correct anything that should be optimized in my post as I am still learning crystal space myself.

Also feel free to email me if you have a specific problem. I will reply even if it is to tell you that I do not know or don't have time to deal with it.