Hello,

I have an animated character that I'd like to use in my game. I'm importing him from Maya into Med, and saving to .mdl. I'm using bones animation.

My problem is that there are pretty big differences between how the animations look in MED and how they come out in the game. For example, when the character blinks in MED his eyelids rotate down and cover the eyes. In the game however the lower edge of the lid looks like it is translating forward while it rotates down, and the eyes poke through the lid when the eyelid is closed all the way.

Another example is a smile: During the smile the eyebrows move slightly, but the eyelids don't move at all. This plays correctly in MED, however in the game the eyelids move forward when the smile plays.

I'm also noticing that in MED itself the rendered character looks slightly different from the wireframe display in the orthographic windows. I.e. in the wireframe views some parts of the mesh are clearly not moving at all, but the rendered 3d view exhibits motion in those parts.

I'm testing all these animations with this command:
ent_animate( my, "smile", my.anim_percentage, ANM_CYCLE);

So here are my questions:

Does MED use the same (basic) rendering algorithm as the game?

Has anyone seen this kind of thing, and if yes, do you know why this occurs? Are there workarounds or solutions?

I'd appreciate any help or hints anyone might have. Thanks.

Here are a couple of screenshots to illustrate the issue:

Blinking in MED:


The same frame in the game:

in fact they are same, but there is no lights in med so it's not visible.

umm.. ok? How does the presence of lights cause this difference then? Does it affect the z order?

a lot of diffrent things can cause this, your skins, yourmodel,...

right... could you give me a hint as to where to start looking? What about the skin or the model would cause these differences?

.. With the eye poking through the eyelid I would guess that the eyelid's skin is just too close to the eye, and the z order gets reversed, maybe due to some rounding thing the engine does. That's easily testable and fixable. But I'm really pretty stumped as to what about my model could be causing the other things I'm seeing.

Like, what would cause the lower edge of the eyelid to appear much lower in the game than in MED:



As you can see, in the game the eyelid actually cuts into the cheek, while in MED it isn't even closing the eye fully. This is the same frame of the animation we are looking at.

Hi Goodberry,

Did you ever find a solution to this problem?

Nope. I gave up.

When I get back to this I will probably just attempt to use vertex animation for the head, and split the model into two (head / body). The bones seem to work ok for larger motion but with the tiny rotations in the face the underlying math isn't good enough. Or so it seems.

I have used MED for over 4 years and no where have I ever come acros this problem.
So, the real question is:
Is the conversion process perhaps the cause?
Its interesting as it could reveal some insights into porting from one application to another and maybe, take advantage of it somehow at a later date.