As the title says. I am hoping that this will be the final step allowing us modders to get units into the game.
Here's the information I've gotten so far from one of our animators (AZO : Our own pipeline is not really externally relevant) There are a few bugs/workarounds involving fbxs in PA engine. In 3ds max, the display unit scale needs to be metric meters. And system unit setup should be 1 unit = 1 meters. Also, everything should be scaled at 100% or 1.0. There's a bug in the engine now where things that are scaled twice as big would appear half as small in game due to some inverted number somewhere. The unit's pivot is the center of the mesh, not the root bone. ( also a PA engine specific issue) That means the pivot point of the polygonal geometry is the pivot of the unit even if the has skeletal structure. All our units only have one polygonal mesh and 1 skeletal hierarchy per fbx.
Much appreciated. I feel bad for asking, but do you think one of you guys could take a screen capture, as you make a simple whitebox model in your 3ds (pyramid shaped tank), export it showing your settings and bone structure, and rig it to a json real quick, and the result loaded in game? I would find this super useful for the simple masses, as it would be a step by step of every necesity to do it. Right now, I find there is guesswork in creating a model that doesn't shrink (what you mentioned), then using the papatool, then rigging it to a unit .json and an animtree or even lacking an animtree, and then loading the game with desired results. This post alone is much appreciated though, now we know why models shrink, I don't think anyone knew the why before, just the "this person's doesn't bug and this person's does".
So know that this has been answered, everything else is fairly simple. On the modeling side there are plenty of guides. For anim trees and .json there are plenty of examples in the game. If you get stuck feel free to catch me on teamspeak.
So although this fixed some of the issues, it didn't fix everything. The bones still rotate 90 degrees. I know this is probably asking a bit much, but do you think you could take a quick look.
Did the "Apply rotation" trick from Blender work/were you able to translate this procedure into 3DS Max? Re-posting below since a few different people have asked for it now.
No, however theses bones aren't rotated at any point. I am fairly sure its another case of some small hidden away setting. No matter how I make the bones in 3DS Max, after converting it to papa they all point along the x axis (z for 3DS Max).
