- Blender DTS Exporter 0.97 Documentation Index
- Installing the Exporter
- Overview of the DTS File Format
- Setting Up DTS Shapes in Blender
- User Interface Overview
- Tutorials
- DTS Meshes
- DTS Materials
- DTS Animations
- LOD - Levels of Detail
- Blender Survival Guide
- Changes from earlier versions
- Notes on Coordinate systems
- Notes on Scale
- Quick Export Feature
- Troubleshooting
- Exporter Credits
Node Animation Tips and Tricks
Sun, 01/11/2009 - 17:07 — Joseph Greenawalt
- Don't use bone envelope deformations. Use vertex weighting for skinned meshes. For more info, look here.
- Make sure that every vertex in a skinned mesh has a non-zero weight assigned to it for at least one vertex group. Vertices on skinned meshes that are missing a weight or group assignment may go flying off in random directions, may "suck into the origin", or may not animate properly.
- Do not alter an armature in edit mode after you have created animations for that armature, unless you are willing to lose those animations. There are exceptions to this, but you have to know exactly what you're doing. In other words, make sure your armatures are more or less finalized before creating elaborate animations.
- If you need to rotate an armature after creating animations, do it in object mode and leave the rotation un-applied. Applying rotation or translation to an armature object has the same effect as altering an armature in edit mode (will mess up existing animations). Note: This is not specifically a DTS exporter related problem. When you mess up your animations by editing or applying rotation/scale/location to an armature, you've messed them up within Blender.
- Don't give two bones in separate armatures the same name. All bones must have unique names or the exporter will rename them for you and write a warning out to the log file.
- A specially named "NodeOrder" text buffer may be used to explicitly control the ordering of exported nodes. The ordering of nodes within the text buffer must correspond to a valid depth-first traversal of the nodes in the scene or armature hierarchy. This is an advanced feature that should only be used if trying to produce a rig that is compatible with animations exported from another modeling package. For an example of using a NodeOrder text buffer to control the drawing order of meshes, see the Orange Guy example model (todo - link).