I/Ogre - Cinema 4D Import/Export Plugin

[Spanki]

Hi,
I am using your I/Ogre ,the registered one ( bought a few days ago).
I am able to import mesh and export as well but when i want to export skeleton a problem arise always.
For example if I import a Jaiqua.mesh and skeleton and then try to export I always get the message...
telling me that I am exportin a skeleton but the plugin failed to find 'Figure Export Tag'

Obiouvsly I set up the Figure Export tag and the Clip tag but I was never been able to export.

Where am I wrong?

In effect my intention would be 'only' to export simple translation\rotation\scaling animation
and I was trying to figure out the concept of exporting animation but as I sad ..I could not try.

Thank
Lorenzo

Hi Lorenzo,

Have you read through the included .pdf documentation file? There is a fairly detailed section on Exporting (starting at pg. 40) - including a checklist of items/issues to be aware of before Exporting (pg. 46).

But assuming you have read through all of that, the only thing I can think of off hand is...

The "Figure Export Tag" (the dog-bone looking tag) must be attached to a "root lvel" object within the C4D Object Manager hierarchy tree (in the above example, this would likely be a Null object, named "Jaiqua"). Again, there are example screen-shots in the documentation that help illustrate this (see page 30 of the documentation). Actually, if you have successfully Imported the Jaiqua figure and skeleton using the I/Ogre plugin, then you should already have the correct structure / layout for Exporting. What might cause that to fail is if you then moved the resulting structure under an additional Null object or something (so that it was no longer at the root level of the hierarchy tree).

I don't mean my reply to be "read the instructions"... I just spent a good amount of time trying to detail all that information in the manual and I don't know of any better way of explaining it than I already did in there, so I just want to make sure that you've already read through that.

If you are still having trouble, could you send me a sample .c4d file that you are having trouble with? (typhoon [AT] jetbroadband [DOT] com)

Cheers,

Keith

[Danoli3]

I'd like to say I am very happy with this exporter overall.

Aside from some 32bit os problems while I was using it and other minor things it did it's job really well.

For anyone planning to use C4D for your 3d program I definitely recommend using this. You can always test it out with the trial too.

[nirvan]

Help!

I want to use this plugin but bone animations not working .
Bones and all is exported but goals animations for animating bones is not working .
Where must be goals? (i read manual and i can't find this)
I make small example model to tests :

http://img686.imageshack.us/img686/92/beztytuuhle.jpg

(with unselected key reduction this not working too)

[Spanki]

Help!

I want to use this plugin but bone animations not working .
Bones and all is exported but goals animations for animating bones is not working .
Where must be goals? (i read manual and i can't find this)
I make small example model to tests :

http://img686.imageshack.us/img686/92/beztytuuhle.jpg

(with unselected key reduction this not working too)

At first glance, it "looks" like you have everything set up correctly... I'm currently on my way to bed, but if you want to e-mail me your file, I can take a look later on today. My e-mail is: typhoon [at] jetbroadband [dot] com

It's been a while since I've used or looked at this plugin, but I _thought_ as long as you enable the Bake Animation option, you don't have to have keyframes on your joints, but if you say that's not working, I'll have to double-check that after I get some sleep.

[Spanki]

...in the meantime... you didn't actually say whether you had keyframes on your joints or not, but since you used Goals, I assume that you keyframed those and not the joints. If you want to do any testing while I get some sleep, try setting keyframes on each joint (basically anywhere you have a keyframe on a goal, set a keyframe on any joints affected by that goal).

Again, I'll need to actually look through the docs to refresh my memory and the code to be sure, but just to be clear - the plugin doesn't know what a 'goal' is and doesn't understand IK at all - it simply looks for and writes out changes to the joints (my only question related to that is whether or not you actually need o have them keyframed, if you have the Bake Animation option enabled).

[nirvan]

Now i know, i must add key every frame but it's very tiring ...
If i use shift+F3 -> functions -> bake object or cappucino, bones don't working

[Spanki]

Ahh - but I'm not sure you need to do all that... I just got up and am going to be afk for a few hours, so I hadn't had a chance to look at the code yet, but my most recent thought is:

As long as you use the "Bake Animation" option on the Figure Tag, then you don't need (multiple) keyframes on each joint, but you still do need at least one. In other words, the plugin needs to find an animation Track for each joint in the timeline.

[Spanki]

Ok, I've had a brief refresher through the source code and...

I might be missing something, but as far as I can tell, as long as you have the "Bake Animation" option enabled in the Figure Tag, you shouldn't need to record any keys on the joints - that option was (specifically) added for people who don't record keys on the joints.

- But you say that it was exporting the bones ok, but with no animations?
- Did your Anim Clip Tag have animtations defined?
- Could you send me your test file so I can figure out why it's not working as I think it should?

Thanks,

Keith

[Spanki]

By the way, I just scanned through my docs again, to see if it was not clear on this topic and it sounds like you had some trouble finding the information, so here are some pointers...

[As of the current v1.5 plugin documentation]

page 40 - in the Export Preparation section...

I'd recommend (re)reading this entire section, but below are some more specifics...

page 46 - in the Export Preparation -> Export Checklist section...

Make sure that your joints/bones have keyframes recorded (just recording keyframes for your Controller objects is not sufficient).

...although this is further clarified in a few other (earlier) places...

page 44 - in the Export Preparation -> Defining a Figure -> Figure Export Tag sub-section...

Information can be found on the Bake Animation option.

page 44 - 45 - in the Export Preparation -> Keyframing sub-section...

This topic has more to do with your actual work-flow than the export process itself – except that you'll need to know this ahead of time in order to get the desired export results ☺.

Probably the biggest issue the plug-in faces is in trying to determine just how a figure is rigged and therefore which objects it needs to be concerned with parsing in the Timeline in order to export keyframed animations.

Each artist has their own particular methods for rigging and animating figures, using various combinations of Nulls, Joints, IK, Constraints, Goals, Controllers, imported mocap data and potentially Expressions and other defomers.

Take 'IK' for example. It's fairly common practice to rig a figure with Joints (or even Bone deformers), set up IK on various sections and then add 'Controller' objects (the Controller objects are typically kept in a separate hierarchy from the actual skeleton). The artist then animates (records keyframes for) the Controller objects, but the Joints themselves may not have any actual keyframes recorded at all.

If you want an exported Bone to have keyframe data and be animated, you'll need to record keyframes for the objects that represent those Bones – alternatively, you need to Enable the “Bake Animations” option of the Figure Export Tag.

...you can still use your controllers and IK and any kind of fancy rigging you can imagine, but when you go to record keyframes, you need to record them for the bones/joints that are being moved by the controllers (or whatever else is moving them)**.

** NOTE: The above advice may not be correct/practical/complete. My expertise is in programming and not animating. Recent testing seems to indicate that recording keyframes on joints that are also being controlled by IK or some other controller/constraint causes conflict, which messes up the animation.

There may be other methods or work-flows of addressing this issue (re-targeting animation from one rig to another, for example), but my current advice (known to work) is that if you are using IK or some other external controlling mechanism (ie. Any case where you are not recording keyframes for the joints themselves), then you should enable the new “Bake Animations” option on the Figure Export Tag. This option causes the plug-in to export keyframe data for every frame, for every joint, so it doesn't bother looking for only the 'recorded' keyframes.

If you do enable the Bake Animations option, you might also want to enable the new “Key Reduction” option as well – this will help compensate for (cull out some of) the additional volume of keys being exported.

So again, as far as I know (from re-reading my docs and looking at the code), it should have worked. If it didn't then I'd need to see your file so I can figure out why it didn't.

[chatton]

hey there spanki!!

Are you planning to update this awesome i/ogre plugin for cinema4d R12?
that would just be the best!

thx!

[Spanki]

Hi.. thanks...

As a matter of fact (and against my better financial judgment), I've just spent the past few weeks working on I/Ogre...

• * R12 compatibility.
  * Improved Animation handling - I have (am still in the process of, actually) overhauled the animation/keyframe Import to remove any drift/jiggle caused by interactions (interpolation) between animation clips. I am also making another pass over the Export side of things.
  * Ogre Import/Export now supports 'Scale' keys (previously only translation and rotation keys were supported).
  * A new "Blizzard .m3 File Import" (Starcraft II) module has been added (no current plans for .m3 Export).
  * A new ".dds Bitmap File Filter" Import/Export module has been (or is in the process of being) added. This plugin also allows you to remap the channels of Normal Maps (that often use the Alpha Channel to store data).
  * A new "Normalize Figure" module has been added - this is a (sub)mesh-spanning "Vertex Normal" generator that will basically generate Vertex Normals for the entire figure in one shot... in the process, it will generate the normals "as if" the separate meshes that make up the figure were welded together (!) - effectively hiding/removing visual seams (smooth-shading, across (sub)mesh boundries). It also honors any 'phong-edge-breaks' you might have set up on any of the submeshes.
  * A new "Alpha Only" Channel-Shader... this shader can be used (along with any bitmap file that has an alpha channel) to expose the Alpha Channel to Cinema 4D (ie. in place of the RGB channels). Some games (Starcraft II, for example) use the Alpha Channel for things like Emmisive Maps.

...I still have some work to do (I still want to make another pass over the VALVe:Source .smd code, etc), and haven't done any Mac compiles recently, but I'm hoping to have something within the next week or so. I'm also planning to do some form of simplistic .material file support - but that might not make it into this next update.

Having said all that, here's the problem... I/Ogre is probably my 'least' successful plugin - in other words, it's heavily (almost exclusively) pirated. This plugin Imports and Exports 3 different file formats (Ogre, MilkShape, VALVe:Source - with Blizzard .m3 Import being added), all supporting rigged/animated figures using a common Cinema 4D setup (making it easy to convert files between those formats) and is the least pricey plugin I offer and yet there are only a handfull of licensed users - sigh. But I don't want to cry about that - I guess it's just the way things are. As mentioned before, if I had any other source of income, I'd do this stuff for free.

So anyway, with the above in mind... yes - I hope to have an update available within the next week or so. For the time-being (at least), I will only be making this update available to my licensed users (I'll send them an e-mail once I have something ready).

Cheers.

[Spanki]

BTW, In addition to the new modules/work mentioned above, I have also found and fixed a few bugs... I just don't know (yet) if these were bugs that I created while doing the R12 port (which involved a massive internal re-structuring of the code), or if they were in the published version of the plugin (I need to go back and look at that version of the code again, to see).

[chatton]

hey spanki!

thanks for answering in such short notice!
i understand how it feels, and i'll be more than HAPPY to buy this new version of your plugin!

btw, what did you mean when you said " I will only be making this update available to my licensed users". Are you gonna notify only the people who already purchased the first version? the people who subscribed to your website?

take care, and can't wait for next week and see that new release then!

[Spanki]

hey spanki! ...
...Are you gonna notify only the people who already purchased the first version?...

I'll post an announcement on my front/news page on my site (and in this thread as well), but my plan is to (only) give the licensed users access to the actual plugin for some period of time before the crackers get it (ie. I won't be posting the 30-day demo version).

I made a preliminary pass at the .smd Import code today... basically, when I was developing the .m3 Import plugin, I came up with a more general (and consistant) way to set up the animation keys (and also added Scale support), so I'm going through now and updating the other file-formats Import code to match. They now share more common code, so it's easier to maintain (and maintain consistancy between the various importers). The .m3, Ogre and .smd Importers have now all been updated - I still need to re-work the Milkshape (.ms3d) code. The common part of the Export code has also been updated, but I still need to add some additional conditions for Scaling support - some formats support scale keys in animations and some don't, etc.

[chatton]

hey Spanki !

how are you doing on the project so far?
i feel like a lil girl waiting for her christmast present, and i'm kindda confused right now
SO,

ANYWAY

can't wait to hear from you ! (no homo)

[Spanki]

I/Ogre v2.3 Update
After a very long time, the I/Ogre plugin is finally available for Cinema 4D R12 (!).

I/Ogre is a Game-Oriented Content Creation plugin, providing Import/Export (focused on rigged / animated figures) for several game-related file formats (Ogre3D .mesh/.skeleton/.material, VALVe:Source Engine .smd files, MilkShape3D .ms3d and now includes a Blizzard .m3 file Import module as well).

This update includes separate builds for R10, R11, R11.5 & R12, so be sure to download the correct version. There was an (un-announced) "v2.2" posted for the past few days, but this update fixes a few things from that version, so if you already downloaded that, you'll want to get this update.

v2.3

New Features:

• Added support for my up-coming xAlpha Channel Shader (to get texture filename).
  Added code to allow mesh/primitive objects within Skeletal Hiearchy.
  Related to the above, if any mesh within the figure (including within the Skeletal Hiearchy) has no weight tag, the mesh itself is now treated as a bone and the vertices of that mesh are bound to this new bone (all vertices get 1.0 weighting to the bone).

Fixes / mods:

• Fixed Ogre3D exported animation (scale) key records to be 'absolute' (instead of delta) values.
  Fixed "missing faces" bug if multiple Texture Tags on same mesh used same Material.
  Finally fixed UV-Baking to correctly handle offset/scaling from Texture Tag.
  During Import (at least for Ogre3D .mesh files), the UVWTag is now added first (right-most tag).
  Changed 'default' Material color value to the blue-grey that R12 uses.

v2.2

[NOTE: The primary changes for this version were the massive changes required for R11.5 & R12 compatibility. There were several (unpublished) intermediate versions along the course of development towards a working the R11.5 / R12 plugin, but all those changes, fixes and/or additions were back-fitted into the R10+ & (new) R11 builds as well... some of the 'fixes' listed below may or may not be relevent to the previously published v1.5 R10+ version (they may be fixes to one of the intermediate versions), but the changes listed below include all changes since v1.5]

New Features:

• Added (simplistic) .material file export for Ogre3D.
  Added support for Maxon License Server.
  Added new "Figure Normalizer" plugin - to generate mesh-spanning smooth Vertex Normals (see the Revision History section of the included .pdf file for brief docs)
  Added new (BETA / as-is) "Blizzard .m3 file Import" module. (NOTE: The .m3 Import module is being included as a bonus/as-is feature - There are no current plans to develop a .m3 'Export' module. While it's had fairly extensive testing on the PC (specifically, R12, 64bit), it has not been tested in any other configuration (most specifically, on the Mac)).

Fixes / mods:

• Added support for Ogre3D 'singleton' section records.
  Fixed 'Animation' Export (R12 only issue?) for all modules.
  Fixed keyframe Import for .smd files.
  Fixed restframe Import issue for .smd files.
  Updated all Import modules to check for and eliminate degenerate triangles.
  Cleaned up Animation Import for all modules to be more consistant (removed cross-animation contamination).
  Beefed up Animation Export support for various scaling issues (Ogre3D files now contain 'scale' records).
  Fixed keyframe bug in all Export modules.
  Added additional BoneID count checks for .ms3d file Export (limit is 128 'skinned' bones).
  Bone -> Vertex weight-clamping raised from 1% to 1/10th% to handle additional cases.
  ....possibly other changes/fixes that I've long-since forgotten .

This is a free update for all licensed users - if you need an updated license key, please send me your updated serial digits and your full name (preferably you should just 'reply' to the first e-mail I sent you). For all others, you can activate the free 30-day trial by entering DEMO as a license key.

[Kryogenik]

FIrst of all, thanks for the plugin. I like Cinema 4D and I was looking for a plugin like this. I'm having trouble exporting animation, though.

I animated my bones and used claude bonet, the "structure" is attached in a .png. The model itself is pretty ugly, since I made it XD The mesh looks fine, but the binary skeleton is only 177 bytes long (which means its blank I guess), so all I see in ogre is the first frame of the animation. I have the tags and the animation clip tag linked to the FIgure Export tag and the null object above below the root null object set as the skeleton root bone (and the the Export as Bone box unchecked for it) and stuff. I must be doing something wrong, but what?

Thanks for any help, I've literally been sitting on my computer for 8 hours (from 3:20 pm to 11:20 pm) trying to export this animated model to Ogre (I found this plugin at 11:00 pm).

[Spanki]

FIrst of all, thanks for the plugin. I like Cinema 4D and I was looking for a plugin like this. I'm having trouble exporting animation, though.

I animated my bones and used claude bonet, the "structure" is attached in a .png. The model itself is pretty ugly, since I made it XD The mesh looks fine, but the binary skeleton is only 177 bytes long (which means its blank I guess), so all I see in ogre is the first frame of the animation. I have the tags and the animation clip tag linked to the FIgure Export tag and the null object above below the root null object set as the skeleton root bone (and the the Export as Bone box unchecked for it) and stuff. I must be doing something wrong, but what?

Thanks for any help, I've literally been sitting on my computer for 8 hours (from 3:20 pm to 11:20 pm) trying to export this animated model to Ogre (I found this plugin at 11:00 pm).

Hi... I'm not fully awake at the moment, but... I'd probably need to see the file to fully understand the problem (if you don't mind sending it to me at: typhoon (at) jetbroadband (dot) com ), but off the top of my head:

- the biggest issue that I see from your image (and description) is... there is no "Skin Deformer" + "Weight Tag" on the mesh object in your scene. The plugin is designed to work with that system, not claude bonet (the Claude Bonet system was completely phased out in R12). I appologize if this was not clear in the included .pdf documentation.

[biancaschule]

As what i have read in the discussions, i think the plugin is really great. Thank you for sharing it here.


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Binary Options Trading System

[Spanki]

As what i have read in the discussions, i think the plugin is really great. Thank you for sharing it here.


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Binary Options Trading System

Thanks for your comments.

BTW, regarding Kryogenik's posts above... those issues were all worked out via e-mail (along with a few enhancements in the latest plugin update) - as far as I know, he's got everything working now.

[nirvan]

I have question. Can you send me any imported from mesh model with skeleton?
Importing not working with me, and it will be good to have ninja or sinbad model to see how bones are connected etc.

Thanks.

[nirvan]

I must every frame press F9 to animation works good, in Cinema R12 i can't find cappuccino , bake animation in figure export tag don't change anything .

edit 1: Ok solved, i select all bones, next press right click on anyone, press show tracks, in new window i select again all bones from up to down (first bone, roll bar to down and press on last bone holding shift) and click bake objects.

edit 2 : Ok i export my first model but there is next error. Some polygons was dissapear look on the screenshot:
http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/5174/beztytuuasl.jpg
Why...

edit3: ok solved, i select all polygons, press align normals, and after this invert normals and all working great

[lynztree]

So I know I am years late coming into this thread. But I was researching ways to import XML files into C4D. Does this plugin solve that problem?
I am beginner status with C4D, can you tell??

Which version of the plugin do I need for this simple procedure? Does it matter?

Thanks!