Intellect's Question o' the Day

[Intellect]

Do you guys create your own icons (hand-drawn) or is there another method that you use? Thanks!

[Stan`]

Usually yes, using a wide variety of methods. Can be 2D painting, or sometimes a bit of 3D and 2D, or more recently vector images using Inkscape.

[Intellect]

Nice! Hey Stan, have an idea for a simple civ to practice "artsing". Ill post in a bit

[Intellect]

Hey all! I was wondering if anyone could assist me in mirroring a prop for the right hand of a unit, I'm running into an issue with this sadly, and cant seem to figure it out ;(

[Stan`]

As I said on discord best way there would be to edit the main mesh directly.

[LordGood]

I'm not sure that will work for what he's going for

The best way to keep track of how a prop will behave on a unit is to constraint lock location and rotation of the prop in question to the prop bone you intend to assign it to. Just remember to separate it before export. You will need 2 different prop meshes, one for each hand

[Intellect]

Hey guys! So I made a building mesh from scratch, but when I go to color it in blender (yes, I DO color in blender, a little!), the paint auto-colors nearly the whole object. The UV map looks terrible too, and is clearly not allowing me to color ANYTHING. Can someone give me any tips on how to better unwrap meshes and such for painting? @Stan`@Itms@m7600

THanks!

[Intellect]

2 hours ago, m7600 said:

Ok, speaking seriously now, here's a suggestion:

1) Wouldn't it be more practical to have all of your questions in the same thread? Not only for the people that take the time to give you an answer, but for yourself as well. You have asked some questions several times in different places, some people answered them, but you asked them again because you didn't see those replies. If you had a single thread for all of your doubts, it would be easier for you to keep track of everything. Plus it's more polite.

2) From what I've seen, your questions fall into two categories: 0 AD specific questions, and general Blender questions. For the former, you have gotten answers every single time. Now, if people don't respond to a question about Blender in general (such as the one you made in this thread), maybe it's because you can find the answer by yourself by watching Blender tutorials on youtube, or by searching your issue on Google. Chances are that someone already encountered the same problem or difficulty, and you can find the answer to it in less than 10 minutes.

3) If you can't find the answer, and it's a question about Blender in general, not a specific issue pertaining to 0 AD, maybe you would get more replies if you posted it on a Blender forum. Some of us here are Blender users, true, but please understand that if we take the time to answer your questions, we're doing it on our free time, and because we choose to do so. In other words, no one here gets payed to do it. This isn't McDonald's. If you get an answer, great. If not, try to give people a reason to give you an answer.

4) For your 0 AD specific questions, try searching the forums before posting them, again chances are that someone already had the same doubt in the past. If not, then by all means, ask away. But let me emphasize once again that all of this is volunteer work. Try not to ping people all the time. As a rule of thumb, ping them if you think that what you're posting will be interesting for them to see, not for yourself. In other words, use pinging to make other people's lives easier, not harder. On that note, Stan's "Forum's Butler" title is just some tongue-in-cheek humour. He's not an actual butler, you know? (unless you want to hire him, but I imagine that you'll have to dish out a hefty paycheck).

Anyways, have fun with the game. Your art looks good from what I've seen, and you have the technical knowledge to work things out. Just try to be a tad more organized, and patient.

Thanks man! Should I just start a thread called "My Annoying Question" and bitcoin anyone who cares to respond?

[Lion.Kanzen]

You can ask always you want.

 

If you are asking art guidance, try post pictures about you are doing.

Edited May 28, 2020 by Lion.Kanzen

[Intellect]

Due to general consensus, I have decided to maintain all of my questions in one place @m7600

Now, to start off, I'm having trouble with getting meshes in game. Here is my issue:

Im creating a very simple tube with armature. I load the .dae file into the mesh directory, and use Stan's skeleton file generator to generate the skeleton XML from the dae file. However, when I open up the game and load up a match, the game shows this:

 

 

Why must I suffer like this??? WHYYYYYYYY. Also this error shows up when I edit the mesh:

 

 

Here is what my mesh looks like. Check the armature layout. Everything seems fine! WHYYYYY

 

Edited May 28, 2020 by Intellect

[Silier]

can you upload mainlog with error, they are very helpful when finding out what is the issue

[Intellect]

2 minutes ago, Angen said:

can you upload mainlog with error, they are very helpful when finding out what is the issue

Thanks for the quick response! Can you show me how to access the mainlog?

[Intellect]

It's almost as if the game doesn't allow for connected armature....hmmm

[Stan`]

You need to rig every vertex to a bone. Even if it's useless root bone

[Nescio]

2 hours ago, Intellect said:

Thanks for the quick response! Can you show me how to access the mainlog?

It depends on your operating system, see https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths

On my end (Fedora 32) it's under .config/0ad/logs/

[Intellect]

3 hours ago, Stan` said:

You need to rig every vertex to a bone. Even if it's useless root bone

Thanks for the advice, Stan! Can a vertex be rigged to two bones simultaneously?

 

[Stan`]

1 hour ago, Intellect said:

Thanks for the advice, Stan! Can a vertex be rigged to two bones simultaneously?

 

Yes it can.

[Stan`]

32 minutes ago, m7600 said:

While animated meshes have a material, "static" meshes should not have any material.

What do you mean? All objects can use the <material> tag

[Stan`]

Ah yeah in this case it's best not to have any sure.

[Intellect]

8 hours ago, m7600 said:

This looks much better, much more organized.

 

Is the mesh supposed to be animated, or is it "static"? I'm asking because they go in different folders. There are some other differences as well. While animated meshes have a material, "static" meshes should not have any material. Sometimes the errors that you get can happen if you misspelled the path to the corresponding file, or if you placed the file in the wrong folder. If you can provide a more complete error log, like it was suggested before, that would very useful for finding out what's going on.

Thanks m7600! Just got back on my laptop. I actually restarted my computer and everything clicked together. I guess that a quirk of Linux is that it has a mind of its own and chooses when its going to work and when it doesn't. Zoinks! More questions to come!

[Loki1950]

Linux does exactly what you tell it to do just like any other Operating System the real trick is knowing what to tell it  most configuration files on Linux are plain text so fairly human readable but getting to know where everything about the flavour of Linux you use is a fairly long learning curve but Most of us that have climbed it are apt to give newbies a hand up.

Enjoy the Choice   

Edited May 29, 2020 by Loki1950
added word