Blender : multiple meshes with one shared skeleton ?

[Ceacy]

Hi,
One of our artists has some problems with exporting models from Blender (i'm personnally totally unable to use Blender) : he created few models, with the same armature, but when he exports them, we obtain 3 .mesh, with 3 .skeleton : and Ogre crashes when we try to make a mesh share its skeleton with another (saying skeletons are different).

How to export one skeleton for several meshes, in Blender ?

Thanks by advance,
Ceacy

[sinbad]

There are 2 ways of sharing a skeleton:

1. Entity::shareSkeletonWith - this shares the skeleton instance, thus animating only one skeleton for more than one entity. Both entities have to use a single mesh with the same skeleton.

2. Pointing more than one .mesh at a single .skeleton. You do this by picking the same skeleton as has already been exported during mesh export (if you know the skeleton is absolutely identical and the exporter supports this), or by using XMLConverter - edit the .mesh.xml and tweak the skeletonlink element to point at the same skeleton before converting to binary.

[BlasterN]

So if i share skelenton, i'll have the same animation state for each entity ?

sounds strange...

[mh]

So if i share skelenton, i'll have the same animation state for each entity ?

From what I gather, that's if you use the way #1 sinbad mentioned.

With #2 you have own skeletons for each mesh, correct?

[SuprChikn]

Yer.

Method 1 is like what you do when you want to add clothing or armour or something to an existing animated mesh in your scene, so the clothing/armour/etc animates and deforms the same as the mesh.

Method 2 is for when you have different meshes or multiple instances of the same mesh that all use the same skeleton blueprint if you will, so that you only have one .skeleton file but multiple things using it (basically this sounds like the one you're after).
It's kinda like how if you add multiple robots or ninjas to your scene (using the media that comes with ogre as an example here), they can all animate independantly, but there is only one .skeleton file to tell them what the skeleton looks like and what it's animations are. See the Demo_SkeletalAnimation if you don't quite get me (it has 10 robots, all animating at different speeds).