New Playermodel; need some technical help

I am working on a new playermodel, and so far things are working nicely except for a few problems.

I got the mesh and animations (based on nyx) working fine ingame:


However I can't seem to find the right spot to put the textures (and the wiki doesn't help in that regard either).
So far I have tried putting a .jpg or .tga with the same name as the iqm into the /data/textures folder and a .dds into the /data/dds/textures folder but as you can see they are not showing up in the game.

Also I wonder about the rather strange shading, e.g. that the one side of the back for example is of a darker grey etc. Is this normal without a texture or could it have to do with the fact that I offset some mirrored parts in the UV-map by -1 to avoid them making problems when baking the normalmap?

P.S: final model is still a long way off, currently I have only the mesh with automatic skinning and a placeholder texture. If I find the time I will also do a male version at some point to make it fit nicely to the erebus/nyx set No promises though

P.P.S.: Any news on animation blending? That the hurt animation overrrides the walkcycle looks just horrible in game

The strange shading you are seeing I would think is the typical checkered "missing texture" in Xonotic, it's probably very stretched and using your UV map coordinates, you shouldn't worry about it unless there are problems with your real texture.

As for getting your own texture to show on the model, make sure the model doesn't have a material in blender (you can just delete it each time before exporting and keep it saved in your .blend if you don't want to lose it), only keep the UV map. Your texture (jpg or tga) should have the same name as the UV. Normally Xonotic will look for a texture of that name in data/textures.

If all else fails, you can create a .skin file. Find the name of the object(s) from your model, then in a blank file:

objectname1,texturename1
objectname2,texturename2

No need for .jpg/tga extension.

Save that as yourmodel.iqm_0.skin (same name as the actual model, with _0.skin added at the end) in data/models where you model is. Check Erebus for an example.

No news about animation blending unfortunately. It is planned but probably a lot of work to do and nobody currently has time for that

It is planned but probably a lot of work to do and nobody currently has time for that

I reckon that Open Source devs should get grants from an organisation (or maybe even the government), which is given out to encourage people to make even more stuff. Of course, there are lots of problems with that. But still... It would be awesome.

It is planned but probably a lot of work to do and nobody currently has time for that

I reckon that Open Source devs should get grants from an organisation (or maybe even the government), which is given out to encourage people to make even more stuff. Of course, there are lots of problems with that. But still... It would be awesome.

Free money is always awesome! But I don't see why the government would give money to hobbyists. I'd like some of that for my hobbies too though.

Haha, yeah. Ultimately, I think that the best solution would be to get devs/publishers like Activision or EA to make games around what the community wants (but even that isn't very realistic). I suppose you can't really do anything to increase Open Source development, other than getting more people involved. That's why we should tell people about Xonotic over the internets.

Anyway, as for the player model: it looks pretty cool!

There is Google's Summer of Code, which Xonotic should apply for some times I guess For this year it's too late though... quite a few other nice FOSS games benefiting though.

@nilfrek
That is rather strange... the original nyx model doesn't have a material, but if I import my .obj mesh into blender one gets added for some reason (not an blender expert, I usually work with Wings3D), but if I then remove that material the iqm exporter gives me an error and doesn't create a iqm file

However it seems to work now, after I had renamed the mesh inside blender to the same name as the texture... still with the material though, otherwise it throws the exeption as explained above.

edit:

It is planned but probably a lot of work to do and nobody currently has time for that

I reckon that Open Source devs should get grants from an organisation (or maybe even the government), which is given out to encourage people to make even more stuff. Of course, there are lots of problems with that. But still... It would be awesome.

Free money is always awesome! But I don't see why the government would give money to hobbyists. I'd like some of that for my hobbies too though.

AFAIR the last time there was talk about donations it was rejected because something. Pity cause I'd love to throw some money at Xonotic (via Flattr).

Back on topic: nice looking model!

@nilfrek
That is rather strange... the original nyx model doesn't have a material, but if I import my .obj mesh into blender one gets added for some reason (not an blender expert, I usually work with Wings3D), but if I then remove that material the iqm exporter gives me an error and doesn't create a iqm file

However it seems to work now, after I had renamed the mesh inside blender to the same name as the texture... still with the material though, otherwise it throws the exeption as explained above.

Ah, strange indeed, but hey, whatever works! For me it never works if the object has a material. Maybe it works because your material also has the same name as the texture/UV? It's possible I never tried that.

Also, I just realized, you mentioned the "pain" animations... It is too late now unfortunately, but the thing is that you based your model on Nyx and Nyx uses some of the old animations which are quite stiff and not always done "correctly", ie: head doesn't always points towards where player is actually looking at, same for the weapon bone which shakes all over the place and misaligned. The pain animations definitely look pretty bad, blending or not, also way too long. I think it only has a few "new" animations, like jump, melee and possibly a few crouch ones iirc. Anyway, you can always tweak them, but it's a lot of tedious work.

I don't know if you're also animator, but if you do decide to make improvements to those anims and there are no changes on the rig, they definitely could be added to Nyx. One of the biggest problem about the playermodels, is that it's not possible to simply copy animations from one to another because any small differences on the rig completely messes up the animations, arms and legs can end up all over the place. I don't know if it's an issue with Blender, but it's terrible. The most up-to-date animations are on Erebus/MegaErebus (those 2 have identical rigs) and Ignis. Unfortunatly impossible to add them to most other models, at best they can be used as base to find the right rythm/fps so it can use the same framegroups but the animations themselves pretty much need to be remade from scratch.

hmm... originally I tried to use the Erebus model, but it was really hard to fit a female mesh to that rig... Ignis might work better or is it the same rig?
I haven't spend a terrible amount of time on the weighting yet, so I guess switching rigs would be less of an effort that fixing animations (I am really not a very good/fast animator). I will have a look at the Ignis one.

But yeah that is a general problem with animations... quite annoying. I read somewhere though that it can be somewhat circumvented by having a rig with the exact same tree structure but different proportions and exporting/importing the animations as a .bhv motion-tracking file. Never tried that myself though.

Edit: The Ignis rig will do, it's not perfect, but the shoulders behave better than with the Erebus rig... if fact you could probably adjust Nyx to use the Ignis rig too.

Seems like there is a way to retarget animations in Blender:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:B...SOC/Manual

Maybe that could be used to get the better animations for all rigs?

Slowly making progress: made a male version

Expect a final version around the year 2050...

2050? Wow, thats fast! or faster then me.

Expect a final version around the year 2050...

Good, we can include it in 0.7 then.

Butch the male robot's chest, thighs and shoulders a bit, it's just like a flat chested female version now.

I haven't seen this player model on any server. Is it still being worked on, or was it discontinued?

According to what I have heard and according to the fact that there aren't many custom player models for Xonotic, I can safely say that making them for this game is a very difficult process. It may not be as hard as making custom models for The Sims 2 and The Sims 3, but it is probably pretty close in terms of difficulty. That is a real shame, considering that Half Life and Quake 3 Arena had many custom player models made for them, but the same cannot be said for Xonotic.

Still being worked on (but slowly... don't have much motivation to work on Xonotic related stuff right now, as I can't play it ATM).
I would say both the male and female version are about 90% done, just some improved weight-painting and improving the skin left. I am thinking about making a release with the current not very detailed skin, so that someone else can improve it or people can use it just as it is (it looks ok in game actually).

All in all making new player-models for Xonotic is actually quite simple (also compared with Half-life or Quake3), it is just that this community is very small and not many artists working on stuff for Xonotic.

Still being worked on (but slowly... don't have much motivation to work on Xonotic related stuff right now, as I can't play it ATM).
I would say both the male and female version are about 90% done, just some improved weight-painting and improving the skin left. I am thinking about making a release with the current not very detailed skin, so that someone else can improve it or people can use it just as it is (it looks ok in game actually).

All in all making new player-models for Xonotic is actually quite simple (also compared with Half-life or Quake3), it is just that this community is very small and not many artists working on stuff for Xonotic.

MirceaKitsune still creates things for Xonotic from time to time.

So that is why there aren't many custom player models. I tried to get the folks at PureZC interested in Xonotic, but none of them came.