FreeGameDev

I posted earlier about Ryzom art assets - viewtopic.php?f=72&t=3478&hilit=Ryzom , you can follow the links in the post to get them. These are a glittering treasure trove of animated models & textures that remains somewhat out of reach. The first problem, for this fossy and blendered community, is that they are all max files. The second more specific problem is with exporting the animations. They always come out slightly stuffed, usually to do with misposition of the root bone. For meshes though, there is no problem. Here are is a series of bodies:

You can download a rarred obj file of them here
I will post any that I convert. In most cases I won't be doing the textures just the mesh +/- animations. The texture work is beautiful, and if I were doing an RPG, either SF or medievil, I would start with these assets, but I'm not. The character models are textured in groups, heads, torso, gauntlet etc.

The image below shows a converted model exported from max as a milkshape file in Misfit. I have marked a few of the seprate groups of the mesh. The head itself is actually a few seperate groups. All these groups have seperate textures, so they are complicated models. Now imagine my joy when this all seem to work, and even more encouraging was the first animation. Notice the first animation, 'applause' looks OK apart from a few vertices with bunged up weights. Then see what happens....

youtu.be/RzJWiZyY1Ws
The next is a 'walk', and it certainly looks wrong, the following 'run', makes the lack of pelvis movement obvious and the mal-rotation of the leg bones, and lastly dying......
So it is very frustratiing. All that art work. The model in misfit and milkshape format is here There may be some max wiz out there who has the answer.

Waibao set 1. More conversions. These are some organic looking houses with mostly the correct textures applied. Max, misfit, milkshape and obj formats plus textures. Each model is around 500 polys. Some would make nice alien veg, hence my interest. Download:


The next is an obj file, without textures, that includes the above models plus trees, treehouses, the Temple of Marduk and some very LP people. These may be low LOD versions. You will have to hunt around for the textures.

Would be really great if you could get the animations converted... but it seems quite a few people tried that before and failed

Hmm, does your max have the option to export to collada or .bvh? Maybe that would work for converting?

This all seems fairly interesting, but I have just one request: Please try to use a more support file format than rar. unRAR, the official rar unarchiver, is not Free Software. Problematically, the only FOSS alternative I know of only supports older versions of the rar file format. To make sure as many people as possible could open these files, it would probably be best to use good old .zip, as it is unproblematic for practically every platform I know of. I'm sure the FOSS community in general would be helped by getting files they can actually open

(If there is a decent alternative, I'd like to know, but I still believe .zip is a better choice as many more systems have support for this out-of-the-box)

TheLastproject: I thought rar was 'more open' than zips, but if not happy to use zips.

Julius: I will try those formats. There must be seveal hundred NPC and player biped animations so it would be great to crack it. It may be I can export them OK from max in 'game ready' md5 or smd, though the smd test exports I have done have also had the fixed pelvis/malrotated bones.

btw some more details over here:
http://opengameart.org/content/bounty-c ... ful-format

cdxbow {l Wrote}:TheLastproject: I thought rar was 'more open' than zips, but if not happy to use zips.

Of course, I could be wrong with the idea that there are no good ways to open it, but the official unRAR utility is non-Free and a GPLv2 replacement can only unpack quite old rar files which nobody ever uses anymore. I personally do believe that .zip would be better in the future (if I'm wrong, I'd love to hear about it, because then I could actually open the .rar files I find on the Internet). However, don't think about wasting your time converting them for me. I won't be able to work on those models anyway as I have absolutely zero modelling knowledge.

Seeing what Julius is writing, there seems to be little hope in the models, but hopefully the vegetation still has some use as they appear to be fairly cool and would quite likely somewhat fit a Sci-Fi style, possibly some MekArcade planet? Who knows.

Thanks Julius, useful link. These assets are starting to sound like fools gold. The Nel rendering problem doesn't affect the animation. See below clap clap animating perfectly, but not rendering in MAx:

youtu.be/osHvt3Y9V7c
Now here is clap clap that has been exported, and the skin applied. Its all OK, but not the animations. I think this one I may have rerigged a bit.:

youtu.be/T5IgYm5PvBc
ThelastProject: You must be able to read my mind. I haven't really looked at non actor assets much, but the waibao ones could make a good base for an alien world.

I have been looking into options quite a bit a while back (but as I don't have a copy of 3DSmax, wasn't really able to do much). But from what I have gathered I would say one can either continue one of the many failed converter options (e.g. write an custom Blender importer, or alternatively exporter for Max):
https://sites.google.com/site/freeryzom/
http://www.transmogrifier.de/ryzomtoogre/
https://github.com/NeoSpark314/blenderNel3dImport
(of which I feel the option of importing the final Nel3d files is the most promising, as you don't have to deal with the crappy 3DMax stuff and know the exported files are working).

Or find a way of hand converting all the animations through a bridging format like .bvh, but as there are already problems in properly exporting the animation from max I doubt this will work.

P.S.: Yes fools gold it is sadly so far.

Edit: But looking at my previous comments, it seems like I am just repeating myself

Uhhmm, cool news, maybe this will help soon:
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/open- ... r-software
Edit: Hmm... even though they compare it to collada and call it an exchange format, there is little talk about an importer to get stuff from one program into another... lets see what comes out of it. Concerning collada, I have to agree, only bad experiences with it so far (in Torque3D and 0 A.D.).

Thanks for the link, Julius. It is almost too good to be true. Perhaps the fools gold will become real gold. Collada has been very unsuccesful for me, so has fbx, even between autodesk products.

Might this be of any use? http://www.greentoken.de/onlineconv/

Thanks for the link. Works well for meshes, with heaps of input formats. Doesn't do max files, but does 3ds and blend. Not so good for exports, only dae, 3ds, x, obj, stl, ply; of these only dae supports skeletal anmiations and I find them very flakey. Does x models and supports skinned animations. At this stage a good tool for meshes, but not so much for animation

Not sure what to make of this as I haven't been able to import the iqe files, but it seems someone managed to convert these into a usable format:
https://bitbucket.org/ccxvii/ryzom-assets/overview
+ for me (blender 2.68) apparently not working .iqe importer from the same guy:
https://github.com/ccxvii/asstools

Edit: was just too stupid to download from bitbucket. Seems to work, but weighting of meshes etc is a bit of a special setup... nothing a bit of tinkering can't solve it seems though.

I haven't had a good look but will when I get home from work tonight.

Julius {l Wrote}:Seems to work, but weighting of meshes etc is a bit of a special setup... nothing a bit of tinkering can't solve it seems though.

I worry about 'nothing a bit of tinkering can't solve'

If it is just about the animations it should work I guess, although I have yet to try to export an animation only .iqm and try to apply that to the base rig in the mesh .iqm.

My concern was about the meshes and how they are skinned to the rig, which seems like a special system to allow for character customization by swapping parts. I guess unless one would replicate that system, it is necessary to assemble the characters from hand and re-weight them to the base rig.

Hey Julius, which asstool should I use and where do I put it? (there are 3 for import)

I used the one with "2" in it, according to the plugin description it is the newest. you can install it from within blender in the settings-addon part. Don't forget to activate it after installing.