thats great news riley mate, already downloaded and will give it a test tonight sometime. hopefully now you will start on the aa prop app (please)

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Looking forward to seeing how it works out for you.  You always manage to find all the obscure bugs in my applications.

And regarding the animated actor prop maker...  I think these brainstorming notes answer that question.

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Riley Entertainment Website - Movies, Mods, and Modding Applications!
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rileyman:

A public beta of the Texture Manager has been released.

 

 

Riley, I downloaded it and then ran it. But then it closed out saying it had encountered a problem and needs to close? Does it have any system requirments that are in particular?

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Contact Me At werecoolmodder@yahoo.com

I've had one other person report an issue like this during the application's startup.  I'm working with him to try to figure out what's causing it.  So stay tuned for updates...

My current thinking is that there is something installed on certain machines that's causing a conflict with the way I've linked the application to the Microsoft system files.  (Specifically, the C Runtime Library).  Truthfully, it's a bizarre issue that I'm not certain I'm going to be able to solve -- trying to debug an application that works properly on "most" systems is not an easy task.

 

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I was so excited to get to use/test your new program I loaded it up, all went well, and then I sat there with not an idea in my head. Some will say that is always the case, but I could not think of one creative thing to do with it I finally played with it and so far it is working for me.

I am running it on Vista 32bit and it seems to work fine. I have some ideas today I want to try but must wait until I get time to mess with it as I am not free to do so tonight. I will let you know if anything changes but so far it is working fine for me.

Those that are having problems might want to try and close all non windows system stuff they have running in the back ground and try to run the program again. Close one program at a time and try to start it to see which one is causing the problem.

We had a couple programs here where I work, if you started the wrong one first the second program would not load. Starting the programs in the correct order worked fine. So, there is not telling which program is causing the offence.

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Always glad to hear when it's working.

I haven't been able to identify the cause of the issue for the two people (that I'm aware of) who aren't able to run it.  I do know that it's something funky that happens when attempting to read the game's PAK files.  I just don't know if it's a security issue or some other kind of conflict.  I may try to rewrite the code to use Windows calls rather than the C Runtime (which would annoy me greatly -- those C calls are supposed to be platform-independent, which is why I used them).

Anyway, I also wanted to make sure people know that I've got a reasonably decent start on the Animated Actor Prop Maker:

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Oh that Animated Prop program looks fantastic! I can not wait to get my hands on it.

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Finally, that is looking ubernewbie proof.

ooh that looks sooooooooo riley mate.

one question, will it have a viewer on it so we can see the actor being formed or will that be too much for ya?

p.s. when its near beta, swing it my way dude, ya know its something ive been dying to see.

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PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE gimmie gimmie gimmie! I can't wait! What I've always wanted!

-deeb

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Saying something "was an empty void" is not possible since a void is empty.

stvndysn:

one question, will it have a viewer on it so we can see the actor being formed or will that be too much for ya?

p.s. when its near beta, swing it my way dude, ya know its something ive been dying to see.

I shall indeed. I'm thinking rysto and skelch should be getting the early look on it as well.  The three of you have supported the efforts towards this all along.   We're probably looking at something that's a month away though...

There will be a viewer on the right-hand side, where there is currently a big open space of nothingness.   One thing I learned from developing the Texture Manager:  I added the viewer a bit too early.  When the time came to add the image compositing functionality, I found I needed to revamp a fair bit of the code.  I don't want to make that same mistake, so I'm doing all the user interface stuff first this time around.

Further info will be shifted back over to my blog for the next few weeks...

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rileyman:

I shall indeed. I'm thinking rysto and skelch should be getting the early look on it as well.  The three of you have supported the efforts towards this all along.  

I'd love to screw that program up for you in a beta. 
Perhaps give you some ideas for some neat extras too.

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If you need more guinea pigs (or canadian bacon, your choice ) i'm available for any beta testing. Got so many requests these days that it would realy help the process (think mad deadline in a crysis situation with live rounds coming from every directions)

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Baby we were Boing to run...

I shall indeed. I'm thinking rysto and skelch should be getting the early look on it as well.  The three of you have supported the efforts towards this all along.   We're probably looking at something that's a month away though...

I am honored and eager to begin messing up, er messing with your aa creator.

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You're very riley

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My name is Happy!TheHappyIsland

And you're able to use starmaker heads! Holy crap!!! I need new shorts! I need this!

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Contact Me At werecoolmodder@yahoo.com

I think I could add you to the list, Mr. Boing.

werecool:  Yep, Starmaker AA-Props are possible, and will be supported by this application.  Interested coders can look at the details of the Starmaker (info.sm) and Head (*.hd) file formats here.

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Riley Entertainment Website - Movies, Mods, and Modding Applications!
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Just a question.

Will it eventually be able to asign accessories such as glasses, watches ring and such? Would one be able to attach a prop to the hand of an aa_prop?

Eventually, that's the goal, yes.

You'll be able to attach standard accessories (those referenced in the costume file itself) in the first version of the application.  These are easier to deal with programmatically, because the costume files directly specify how to attach them to the skeleton (for animation purposes).

After releasing this first version, I'll be continuing work on a second version that will allow you to attach any mesh to any part of the skeleton.  The trick to attaching meshes to an AA-Prop's hand is going to be in properly rotating and translating it into position.

I'm hoping to put together a community collaboration at that time.  It would involve different people using a 3D modeling application to apply the proper transformations, for some specific purpose.  They'd record the transformations they applied, and send it off to me.  I'd test it out, and add it to a list of "hand-held accessory types".

For example, a while ago I created a prop that wields machine guns (for someone who will remain nameless until their film is released).  It took trial & error, but I eventually I got it into place.  I used my Prop Transformer to perform the transformations.  (As of right now, you could then use MeshManip to attach it to an aa-prop; and assign it to the right hand on the skeleton.)  The below command should work for all props found in "guns_automatic.ini":

r3-tm-transformprop p_gun_m16.msh p_m16_aaprop -rx -35 -ry -90 -rz -145 -rx -1 -c -0.05 0.87 -1.45

That'll be the first I can add to the aforementioned list of "hand-held accessory types".  It took a hour or so to get it lined up properly.  Basically, we'd need to go through all the relevant INI files found in \data\props\, and figure out the above for each.  By my count, there's 300 such files -- probably half of which are for hand-held props.  Hence why I'm hoping it can be a bit of a community effort.

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Riley Entertainment Website - Movies, Mods, and Modding Applications!
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Rileyman, I'm currently digging into the bone rig portion of the Blender import scripts, so it's really fresh in my mind... and could share what I know about the bone matrixes that you could swipe from probably any skeleton file, for any particular bone you'd like to place the prop at, or use as a base starting point.

Basically the matrixes for all bones are rotated +90 around the z axis... or the easiest way to readjust is to reorder the matrix the following way:

m31,    m32,    m33
m11,    m12,    m13
m21,    m22,    m23
offx,    offy,      offz

If you multiply this matrix by the matrix of your object (if your object is at 0,0,0) it should sit right at the bone-joint, oriented in the same direction as the bone itself (in the T-pose, of course).  You can then just use different offsets to shift it in space. Either alter its x,y,z directly or multiply it by an Identity matrix with the offsets in it ... i.e.

1,    0,    0,    0
0,    1,    0,    0
0,    0,    1,    0
offx,offy,offz, 1

This post on DCMF covers the basic single-axis transforms, which you can apply by simply multiplying them by your object matrix.

PM me here or on DCMF if you need more info!  luck!

(PS Excellet work on the app, it looks absolutely fantastic!! )

 

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"Badge, Manny! BADGE!!"

It took me a minute to see how that might be relevant to what I was doing.  Heh.

I hadn't thought of using the transform data that exists in the skeleton.  I'm not sure if hand-held props would totally line up properly.  But even if they don't, I imagine it'll be a whole lot less fiddling...  Thanks for the idea!

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Riley Entertainment Website - Movies, Mods, and Modding Applications!
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Are you interested in hearing of a small bug/issue I encountered with your Texture Manager?  I tried to double click a texture in the list box (hoping it would select all like-minded textures of that animation sequence).  Instead the program just hung on me...

Could be Vista playing silly buggers with your nice code.

Yep -- I always want to know about potential bugs, and will do my best to fix them.

Are you able to consistently recreate the problem?  ie.  If you go back in, double-click on the same file, does it hang again?  Or is it more of a random thing -- sometimes it works as planned, sometimes it doesn't?

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It was consistent.  I did it once and it hung.  Restarted the program, double clicked a different file and it hung again.  I don't think I've tried this double click trick until today, so I don't know if it happens ALL the time on my machine or not.  Will investigate a bit more tonight (at home).

(One small, unlike possibility:  the directory with the overlays in it also had the original Photoshop files (.psd?) in there are well, with virtually the same file name (different extension only).  Could it be your program was trying to load them as well?  Just a thought.)

Here's a little update.  I double clicked on a couple of different .dds files in my overlay list, and it automatically selected a bunch of similarly named files that were NOT necessarily in the animation sequence.

Here's a example the kiddies can try at home:

Double click this one: overlay_spaceship01b_v00.dds (there is no _v01.dds, etc, just itself.)

What you get is all the spaceship overlays (02a, 02b, 03a, 03b) selected and loaded.

And I think this is actually the problem I mentioned earlier, as I have just tried double clicking an overlay I have called overlay_upm01_v00.dds, and the program seemed to lock up.  By with a little patience, I waited until it finally responded (about a minute later) and ALL the files that started with overlay_upm* were loaded as one animation sequence (and I have a LOT of them... three movies worth at least).

So basically, I think the auto selection process is being too liberal...

Make sense?

(Cool tool, nonethesless!)