Ballistic Weapons into UT99

[ASLY]

Why the hell can't we play as a nali, and quad-wield hand guns

lol, What idea!
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Torax, this project is stopped?

[Blade hunter]

Interesting I would like to know how you convert all those meshes and animations to UT99 and I would like to know if it's possible to do so in a game such as Deus Ex, Unreal1 or even Rune, because none of those games do support skeletal animations and this would be awesome to convert some of my work into those old games using blender 3D. possibly giving a second breath to unreal modding.

[Torax]

Interesting I would like to know how you convert all those meshes and animations to UT99 and I would like to know if it's possible to do so in a game such as Deus Ex, Unreal1 or even Rune, because none of those games do support skeletal animations and this would be awesome to convert some of my work into those old games using blender 3D. possibly giving a second breath to unreal modding.

Great to see you here, Blade)
Your question..umm..it's quite a long story.
If shortly, i've spent a lot of time trying to find a way to convert models from Blender directly into Unreal in .psk and .psa formats, because i was not satisfied with "power and strength" of vertex animation.
And i found it.

But firstly i want to correct you. Unreal and UT SUPPORT skeletal animation.
They only have no good tools to manipulate with them, mesh viewer sometimes can crash if specific conditions are met and so...but it is possible to use skeletal meshes and related to them animations, even in Default Properties (in "Display" tab), if you fill the field "Mesh" with some name of imported skeletal mesh, it will correctly shown as "SkeletalModel"BlahBlahBlah.ModelName"" ( or "SkeletalMesh"BlahBlahBlah.ModelName"", can't remember exactly..)

Take a look to this topic. It shows a result of my works.
http://www.ut99.org/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=5570

This kind of Q3 Rail Gun was fully created with blender. It is model with 3 animation sequences - Select, Fire, DeSelect.
All three types of models - i mean PlayerViewMesh, PickupViewMesh and ThirdPersonMesh - are skeletal. I made even pikup and 3rd person models in that cause, that as you probably know, importing to skeletal model format, saves it's unique shape, while import to vertex model totally skrews original forms, making polyhedrons from nealy perfect circles.

I also fixed problem with one well known issue of skeletal models. I mean that skeletal model can hold only one related to it animation. Firstly i noted this bug when saw that third person model plays same animation as first person ( dispite the fact that each model have it's own .psa animation file - all anims for first person model and simple 1 frame "Still" animation for other two models).
This bug was fixed with code that resets and if needed - re-links animation depending on what mesh currently used. I was totally surprised when found somewhere in the depths of UT source code variable, that responsible for the Skeletal Animation as class. That helped me a lot.

And another one thing.
You will see that blue energy "stream" on top of the Rail Gun. It is animated IceTexture. To explain in more details - i also found a way to manipulate with polygon flags for skeletal models, such as UnrealFX can do for vertex ones. It is possible to set two-sided polygons, translucent polygons etc.
The way is somewhat simple.... but requires some coding and specific operations over the model - method highly depends on UV layouts and texture order you will set on model editing stage. I mean that if you need some polys with bMeshEnviroMap set to true - you will need to group them all together to use one UV layout and texture map, which in future will be FireTexture, IceTexture or whatever.

So as you can see - there's nothing impossible in this world)
I hope you will understand all i wrote here, i'm still bad in english sometimes)
If you will need more explanation, i'm ready to help. But it is really REALLY a lot to write and explain) if only we can contact in other ways to let me instantly show examples.

[Blade hunter]

Sounds a bit complicated but I see it can be possible , this is interesting because I tried to help somebody with an animated lower body art for a kick system
Once I finish my works on an UT99 mod I made with some people I can send you the meshes and animations

[Torax]

Sounds a bit complicated but I see it can be possible , this is interesting because I tried to help somebody with an animated lower body art for a kick system
Once I finish my works on an UT99 mod I made with some people I can send you the meshes and animations

It is hard in only cause that it needs a lot of time converting from different programs (mostly setting them up)

Sure, i will help as i can

[Blade hunter]

I believe the content I have may interest you for your UT remodeling project, but yeah I would love to see some blender 3d scripts as simple as the PSK/PSA script for Unreal Engine 1 games to tell you.

[Torax]

I believe the content I have may interest you for your UT remodeling project, but yeah I would love to see some blender 3d scripts as simple as the PSK/PSA script for Unreal Engine 1 games to tell you.

Actually, there's no scripts for that.

As far as i know, Blender psk\psa exporter is somewhat glitchy and seems to be broken. All my attempts to export models using it failed.

Workflow is pretty easy: Blender 3D > MilkShape 3D > some coding and compiling using MinGW C compiler.
I finish model in Blender - modelling, texturing and animation. Then i export model into MS3D format. This exporter works perfectly, only needs tweaking of some settings (mainly orientation, smoothing groops and some other)...it is experimental part because results can be very different, for example, i did mistakes which resulted as bones, that are not fit assigned parts of models to them - skeleton floating somewhere behind or above model.
After export, i open model in MilkShape and check result of export. Fixing small issues if they exist and they are possible to fix without making re-export (re-welding vertices, flipping faces, etc).
Then i reassign textures to proper groups of polygons and prepair skins for the third (and last) part of workflow.

If everything great, i export model with it's animation into PSK and PSA - exporter in MilkShape works perfectly.

If model must have some specific polygons - third step is required. To change their flags i need to change few parts of code in .c file. After that i start compilation of this code. If everything goes good - i will found old PSK file and recompiled PSK file in the directory of compiler.

And the last pert - importing into UT (Unreal 1 or whatever). Nothing hard this time, #exec directives for porting skeletal models with animation not harder than same for vertex models. There are only few specific commands which must exist in the .uc file. Otherwise import will be broken.

Yep, it is a lot pain in da ass doing all those steps, but this method works perfectly if you did not made mistakes during some of those actions.

[Blade hunter]

So if I give you milkshape 3d format you can export to unreal engine 1 ?

[Torax]

So if I give you milkshape 3d format you can export to unreal engine 1 ?

Yep.
As i remember only few specific things...when i created animation in Blender and then exported into MS3D format, i used one specific option that fully separates animation into short frames. I mean if you have an animation of 10 frames, starting keyframe is at point 0 and ending keyframe is at point 10 and there is no intermediate keys between starting and ending keys - this option fills empty space between those points. This helps to create more smooth and realistic animation and useful for complex, non-linear animations. Although it can increase file size.
Another thing is specific names for textures, but i think it can be fixed in Milkshape - i only will need to know which parts of model must have specific flags for polygons.

I think thats all. If other problems can rise - they will be solved eventually