REQz: Seeking some technical help with a custom creature skeleton and mesh

[syscrusher]

Greetings, all!

 

I am using an excellent tutorial from the CS wiki to create my first from-scratch creature for Oblivion. I've got a mesh (with temporary textures), skeleton, and rigging and skinning done. Everything works just fine in Blender, in pose mode. If I move the bones of my skeleton around, the mesh follows as intended. I also created the skeleton collision for ragdoll behavior, skeleton constraints, and the BSBounds object for weapon and spell impact detection.

 

The creature isn't yet animated. I know how to do that part, mostly, and I wanted to test the mesh and skeleton in the game engine before expending the vast effort to animate it.

 

This is where things have gone a bit wonky, and I'm hoping someone out there can help me out. I don't want to post my mesh online, because it would be a total spoiler for my  new quest (an addition to Rathunas). The custom creature is intended to be my "boss" for the dungeon.

 

What's working:

• The mesh and textures look fine in the TestingHall.
• Pose mode in Blender works perfectly, suggesting that animation will also work when I attempt it.
• Cursor on the creature shows its human-visible name, and you can activate it as you would a vanilla creature.
• The creature is selectable with the mouse in console mode.
• With "motion guides" displayed via console command, you can see the collision mesh, and it looks correct.

What's not working:

• Collision with the player -- I can walk right through my creature.
• Placement on a console disable/enable cycle -- it mysteriously translates and rotates on the z axis when you do this.
• Ragdoll -- if I kill the creature, via console or attack, I crash to desktop.

I think my ragdoll problems may be because my constraints, which are all of the "ball joint" type, are not all correctly aimed along the axis of the bones. I know how to do that in NifSkope, but it's really tedious and would have to be repeated every time I re-export the skeleton. Hopefully that won't be too often, but during development it will happen a few times. One of the areas where I'd like to get some help is to understand how to set those constraints within Blender so they export correctly.

 

I also have a small number of bones that are not connected to parent bones; they just have an origin in space because for my animations they didn't *need* to be connected. But maybe Oblivion requires all bones to be connected?

 

The biggest problem, obviously, is the CTD when I try to ragdoll this beastie. That is, ummm, kind of a show-stopper. :-)

 

So, are there any creature animators out there who might be willing to take a look at my mesh (which I'll supply by private communication) and help me figure out where I'm being stupid?

 

Thanks for any help that someone might care to offer. :-)

Edited April 12, 2015 by syscrusher