Im currently digging away at the md5 examples, but im am having trouble trying to animate my own figure in Blender and the play it in Away3D 4.0

Currently i am using a md5 export script from katsbits.com, thats designed for blender 2.57

And the md5 mesh works fine, but the animations only play partially, as in the the bones only apear to be moving part of the way the should, also i have had issues after weight-painting, which caused the entire mesh to apear morphed to a unrecognizable state.

So my question is, what software(3ds Max?/Maya?)/scripts are you guys using for rigging and animating and the exporting the whole chibang to MD5 format?

also are there any things im supposed to look out for when rigging for the MD5 format? maybe in terms of weight-painting?

Hi Seb, I am using 3D Studio MAX and it works great.
I wrote a tutorial on the subject.
http://videometry.blogspot.com/2011/05/mocap-to-molehill-via-3d-studio-max-and.html

One problem I had in the start was the Zero Weight issue, which might be what you’re experiencing. Another is that the MD5 format itself was apparently designed for a different coordinate space, so models and animations are mirrored on the x-axis when exporting from Max to Away.

Good luck!

Ah yes, i did look at your article briefly, i dismissed it too quickly it seems, i will give it a thorough read-through when i get home from work, thanks!

year i figured out the zero weight thing, anything not weighted simply does not apear in Away3D, im still having problems with the weights when everything is weighted tho, the model becomes morphed as if the weights where wrong(looks alright in Blender), could also explain why my model doesn’t animate right.

My conclusion is something is most likely wrong with how i am weight-painting i think.

A observation i have seen tho is using only 1 bone my figure seems to animate correct, if i use multiple it goes all wrong =/

Very cool tut. Peter!
We need a list with gems like that:)

Just for people looking for info using search

Finally made this work with blender, problem was some unused vertex groups laying around i think, also i improved the bones a lot

My blend file for reference, feel to use it however you see fit.
http://www.filesonic.com/file/1598736814/stickman.blend

Hello sebbdk,
can you please describe a little bit deeply what the problem was? It seems I have exactly the same problem with my testing the bones md5 animation from Blender. That is, that when I use only one bone in my very simple model, it looks good in Away, but when I add another bone let’s say to the other leg, the mesh looks broken like the animated leg was placed somwhere else. Your model looks and works good, but I’m a newbie in Blender, so I can not see the diffrence   Any help would be really appreciated.

@kloff

mkay, il rant a bit about what i learned when i explored it

first of all,
MD5 uses one root bone, to which alle other bones must be related to as children or grandchildren

there can never be 2 root bones, only ever one

vertex groups must be named the same as the bone the belong to

the md5 export script i used is from katbits.com, i could not find any alternatives

Avoid unused vertex groups, under object data on your mesh look at the vertext group list and delete groups that dont refer to a bone, having other vertex groups seemed to mess up my exports

I suggest trying to use bone envelopes instead of weight-painting which i could not get to work properly

if you still have problems have a look at the md5 specification and open the file up in a text editor, it’s not a binary format

Do tell if any of this solves your problem, i messed so much around with my figure and started my bones over several times to get it right

haha nice - I like the character. Thanks for providing a Blender example to experiment with. I’ve had a thought for a while now that it would be pretty easy to modify the md5 export script and Away3D parser to make/work with a binary file. It would be interesting to see how much smaller the files would be.

The Away3D md5 parsers extend ParserBase.as which has a simple built-in switch variable to handle .BINARY or .PLAIN_TEXT so once again the brilliant devs have our backs on trying something like that.

Ah, you’re great. I’m going to try it tomorrow. I’ll do some report if I could win this round

Thank you a lot!

I found a good md5 viewer that may help anyone else working in this format:

http://assimp.sourceforge.net/main_viewer.html

@ sebbdk
Hurray! My animated ‘model’ is now rendered the same way in Away as in Blender, thanks to your recommendations. I think, that the root bone was it!
I had to add vertices to vertex groups manually, for neither weight painting nor envelopes seemed to work for me - but I’m still at the beginning with Blender, so it could be my lack of skill. Thank you again!

@ Choons
I found it useful. But I’d like to make such a viewer with Away and Air myself, just to be sure that particular model and animation will work well in flashplayer. So I need to go ahead with it or maybe wait for new version of Prefab

I’ve had a great deal of trouble with this same process, and I also had to manually define vertex groups in Blender to get it to animate correctly in away3d.

My problem was that any vertices that I had done manual weight painting on were appearing at the root bone, causing it to appear like sections of the mesh were stretched back to the root. I tried using the ‘Normalize All’ and ‘Clean’ functions in Blender weight painting, which are supposed to set all vertex weights to a sum of 1, but that didn’t help.

I think part of the cause for the problem was that the vertex groups were automatically defined when I parented the mesh to the skeleton using automatic weights. Some of the weights were incorrect, though, so I weight painted them. This caused the weight painting to be different than the vertex groups, and this inconsistency caused the problem (for whatever reason). So, I think if a vertex has zero weight for a bone, but is in that bone’s vertex group, the mesh gets screwed up.

What I had to do to solve it was weight paint the mesh not using the brush, but by selecting vertices, then setting the weight using the vertex groups panel in the object data panel. What this means in detail is:
1. Selecting a group of vertices.
2. Making sure the correct vertex group is selected in the vertex panel.
3. Set the weight that you want these vertices to be.
4. Click ‘assign’.

Also, make sure that no vertices that have zero weight for a bone are in that bone’s vertex group.

Then, once you’re done with this, Normalize All and Clean under the weight painting tools. I hope this helps someone.