PSA files into Blender

[zaphzaph]

Hello all,

I'm actually trying on import psa files into Blender for test to realize new animations.

And unfortunately that don't work for me.

I've install the lastest add-on and i've this error :

Can you help me ?

[Pedro Falcão]

Enrique reports some problems with this version of Blender here: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15552&st=320

Maybe something related?

[Enrique]

Hello zaphzaph,

I'm not an expert in the animation area, but I think the blender addon for .psa relates to UDK animation armatures. I don't know if it's the same .psa format exported by Max3D (which I think our psa animations are from Max)

I'll try to investigate more on this (I didn't know that blender had .psa importer addon).

Coincidentally, I'm downloading the last UDK version to get started with it... I'll make some tests and see if UDK is able to import our .psa animations and if they can be tweaked further from there.

[historic_bruno]

If you mean 0 A.D.'s PSA animations, those are proprietary binary files and specific to the game, so I'd be very surprised if anything else used them (other than maybe a Max plugin we used before supporting COLLADA).

[zaphzaph]

in reallity i mean, that the PSA files are animations files specifific to 0 ad and particulary to Pyrogenesis.

But i don't know how to open it to work on this animation !!

Please can you tell me how to do that !

[quantumstate]

I don't think that the PSA files can be loaded into any software currently (except for the game itself).

[Lion.Kanzen]

you can use blender zaphzaph? sorry if i ask this off topic matter, im interesting in reclute some people for bronze mode, and i see your the request to collaborate in documemntation, but is more plus if you can do other skills.

apologies again.

[historic_bruno]

But i don't know how to open it to work on this animation !!

Please can you tell me how to do that !

Are you using our SVN repository or a release version of the game? If you're using a release, the original COLLADA (.dae) files will be pre-converted to PSA, but you can get the originals in most cases from SVN. For the others, some of the source .max files are in our art SVN, we might be able to get those if you need them.

Which animation(s) were you looking for in particular? Also keep in mind the animation needs a rig/skeleton to be useful for anything, the PSA alone wouldn't help you much (the particulars of what it is can be found here).

[zaphzaph]

i use blender 3ds max and maya ( with student license )

I use SVN repository

i'm looking for pikemen attack and other animations there are just in PSA format.

How can i found a converter PSA to DAE ?

[historic_bruno]

There is no PSA to DAE converter as far as I know, you would need both PMD + PSA to recover a usable DAE, the PMD has the rig/mesh while the PSA has the animation frames. They are both lossy formats designed for efficiency, so we discard any data from the original DAE we don't need (including e.g. bone names). There is a PMD to DAE converter written in Python here, no effort was put into a PSA to DAE converter because there was a notion to redo most of the PSAs which alas, hasn't happened and may not.

[zaphzaph]

ok can you just explain me how to use it please ?

[historic_bruno]

The short answer is there's no way to edit and modify PSAs.

It's probably less effort to just create new animations and rigs from scratch, unless you have the source file, even Blender's DAE importer is buggy (I don't know about Max or Maya), so even if we could recover DAEs they wouldn't necessarily be all that helpful for modding.