Could you detail what your issues were? You're last post was edited so often it's a little confusing to read and figure out what problem you had.
But I'll try to briefly answer some of the questions:
Materials - Yes you have to create PDX materials, these exist in the Blender scene and you must assign them to meshes. Only meshes with PDX materials will be exported, other meshes are ignored. Once you create the materials you can assign textures etc to them as usual, they are no different to standard Blender materials... just with some extra data to link to PDX shaders.
Animation - As long as the timeline is set to the right start and end points, just select the armature that your mesh is skinned to and export animation.
Skinning - You MUST only have 4 bone influences per vertex for the mesh to skin properly. Otherwise you will get all sorts of animation problems and mesh tearing etc. There is a function in Blender to ensure this requirement (Limit Total in Weight Paint mode).
Importing - If you export your Blender scene and then try to re-import it from .mesh then it will NOT look the same. There will probably be more meshes when you re-import because exporting splits the mesh into individual materials. There may be other splits within the meshes themselves depending on how your UVs and normals are setup.
Try to follow the guide that 1codemaster has written, it's pretty good. If you have errors when trying to import a file, then upload that file here and I will take a look for you.
Good luck!
I redid the steps and gave it another go and here is a screenshot so you can see my current issue (click to enlarge):
The four on the left are my control groups using the Collada export method that experience tearing.
The 5th one, the far right I used your exporter and for some strange reason only the front and back hair meshes are showing; the rest appear to be invisible? There's no errors in the error log. There is a little bit of distortion that might be because of weights needing to be renormalized but the animation looks perfectly fine in Blender.
In the screenshot is how the setup looks when I click on the exported .mesh file in Jorodox; everything looks fine. I am deeply perplexed.
I checked the following:
-The working hair mesh and the not working other meshes all have the same normals.
-They are all facing the same direction.
-All the meshes have the pdox materials assigned. I'm not sure if you mean some special other step but I just replaced my original cycles material with the created pdox one, but only hair shows up...
My .gfx entry:
Code:
#### Mesh 5
pdxmesh = {
name = "homunculus_portrait_05"
file = "gfx/models/portraits/homunculus/homunculus_portrait_05.mesh"
animation = { id = "idle" type = "homunculus_portrait_05_bored_animation" }
animation = { id = "bow" type = "homunculus_portrait_05_bow_animation" }
scale = 1.0
meshsettings = {
index = 0
texture_diffuse = "Hair3.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortraitHair
}
meshsettings = {
index = 1
texture_diffuse = "Homunculus.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortrait
}
meshsettings = {
index = 2
texture_diffuse = "Clothes4_Headgear4.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortraitClothes
}
meshsettings = {
index = 3
texture_diffuse = "Clothes4_Headgear4.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortraitClothes
}
meshsettings = {
index = 4
texture_diffuse = "Homunculus.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortrait
}
meshsettings = {
index = 5
texture_diffuse = "Clothes4_Headgear4.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortraitClothes
}
meshsettings = {
index = 6
texture_diffuse = "Homunculus.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortrait
}
meshsettings = {
index = 7
texture_diffuse = "Homunculus.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortrait
}
meshsettings = {
index = 8
texture_diffuse = "Homunculus.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortrait
}
meshsettings = {
index = 9
texture_diffuse = "Clothes4_Headgear4.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortraitClothes
}
meshsettings = {
index = 10
texture_diffuse = "Clothes4_Headgear4.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortraitClothes
}
meshsettings = {
index = 11
texture_diffuse = "Homunculus.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortrait
}
meshsettings = {
index = 12
texture_diffuse = "Homunculus.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortrait
}
meshsettings = {
index = 13
texture_diffuse = "Clothes4_Headgear4.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortraitClothes
}
meshsettings = {
index = 14
texture_diffuse = "Hair3.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortraitHair
}
meshsettings = {
index = 15
texture_diffuse = "Clothes4_Headgear4.dds"
texture_normal = "nonormal.dds"
texture_specular = "nospec.dds"
shader = PdxMeshPortraitClothes
}
}
I removed the name=jorodox bits since this was original jorodox code. What else can I attempt?
Edit to add/clarify: No errors in the log also means those textures I selected definitely exist. And the control groups showing up fine shows they aren't empty texture files.
I added another image to show the counts.
Edit: I have NAILED down what I think the problem IS at least. Every mesh seems to once exported, behaves as though there is only the Hair material applied, or the Hair texture; the .gfx file should be correct though, but I know for a fact that at least one other mesh is in there because when I click through the different hair styles I see "extra" hair pop up in a strange place that matches what I do in blender if I swap all of their materials. I will try playing with the "assign material" button and see if that fixes it but after that I will remain befuddled.
Edit: Going through each mesh and making sure the materials were assigned resulted in no change, but at least I guess we know what the problem is.
-Either that materials aren't assigned right (i.e they all have the exact same material assigned), or, they all have the same texture assigned. I will do a quick experiment that probably won't be conclusive.
Edit: I have NARROWED it down even FURTHER! The game is afoot!
I believe the problem is that the Blender .Mesh export is only exporting a SINGLE mesh. Essentially only the Mesh Settings with Index 0 in my .gfx currently does anything.
1 through 16 appear to do nothing (changing them has seen no change) which implies the problem is that the exporter does not export multiple meshes to a single file properly or I did something very wrong. Which is extraordinarily weird because Jorodox sees all my meshes just fine as you can see in the above screenshot.
Any suggestions?
Screenshot:
Hard to see since you can't see movement but this more or less proves the issue is something like I described, there appears to only be one mesh, but all the submeshes are clearly there.
