Blade hunter wrote: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.
Unreal. Alter your reality..forever...