From blender/3DS max to .papa a (hopefully) foolproof guide

My experience also

You need to link the mesh to the armature with the armature modifier. However, even with the bones, the model won't animate. I suspect that this is because the default blender fbx converter adds an extra bone (the armature itself) below all other bones, which doesn't work with the existing animation trees.

You may be able to fix it here: http://krisredbeard.wordpress.com/tutorials/tutorial-blender-to-udk-player-model/

Unfortunately I get an error trying to use papatran (mscvp101.dll, even though the PA folder has a dozen copies of it) so I can't test if this actually helps. (I probably need to reinstall PA.)

This didn't work; still no bones. I did it according to this: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/D...armature#Add_an_Armature_modifier_to_the_Mesh

So after exporting a correctly set up blender file to .fbx, and then importing that to 3DS max, the bones still don't work. Rather then having bone_root, you see armature -> armature | bone_root. When that goes thought papatran the bones are removed.

Whenever I export from blender as a .fbx then open up in 3Ds Max, it has all of the bones, and those bones even work. However when saved as a .FBX from 3Ds Max and pushing it through papatran... Only three bones as well..

I am assuming that in 3DS Max the bones show up but have extra stuff bolted on? That's what I was getting. To make it work from 3DS Max you need bone_root on the top, and not stuck under anything. I hope that made a little sense.

Liquius, I'm having trouble getting this model working: http://www.mediafire.com/download/bn1e2uzm27o9ima/tank_attack.papa

Anything you can see that looks broken about it?

When the unit was tank_hover it was loading vanilla papas. After renaming it to tank_attack in all of the appropriate spots, it stopped appearing in the build bar outright.

Model looks fine to me. Did you add it to \ui\main\shared\js\build.js and the unit list?

Yeah, and also added an anim tree. You could take a look through our code and see if anything looks broken in you want.

Well the fist thing that's missing is the actual hover tank papa and json. I guess someone took them out.

They're tank_attack.json and tank_attack.papa, found in tank_attack.

As I said, when it was tank_hover it was loading the papa from vanilla.

If it matters Raevn's papa exporter was used to produce the model.

The weapon, ammo, and animtree are all still tank_hover, but paths are set up correctly so they shouldn't be the problem.

@stuart98, send me the unit files you currently have and I'll take a look.

I got it working. Had a bone attached to the wrong bone. Fixed that it she works like a charm, as this screen taken by @burntcustard shows:

So how exactly are you guys getting the bones to export properly and everything? And how do you set up a model with a turret that pitches and yaws?

I'm running into that 3 bones only appearing issue if i do it via blender fbx export -> papatran.

So I tried figuring out how to do it with 3ds max setting up the bones and all. Except i have no idea what i'm doing and it's crashing everytime i try to attach weapons to bone_root lol.

Am I doing this right? (I presume not)