The menu "File/Add File" can also be used to add m3a files when you select the correct file filter in the file selection dialog. Note that you need to add a m3 model first before adding a m3a animation to it.
In the "scene" tab of a properties editor in Blender there is a panel "M3 Material". Click "+" there and configure an diffuse image path in the "M3 Material Layers" panel. It's also an good idea to add an m3 animation in the "M3 Animations" panel since even static models have usualyl an animation.
In the time line editor (per default visible at the bottom) you can set the start and end frame for the currently selected m3 animation. If Blender is configured to have 30 frames per second (automatically done when you import a m3) then a frame range 0 -59 would represent a 2 second long animation.
Oh nice, didn't you can add m3a files in the previewer to models. That's a really nice feature.
I played around with creating nova animations and they seem right. In the blend file you attached there is no model so I can't confirm that
the gun is actually in novas hand in Blender. But I suggest you don't post the whole model here because Blizzard has the copyright.
About attachment points: Their location and rotation and scale get represented by bones. So if you make a animation for a model you always make
at the same time an animation for the attachment points of a model.
There was a bug in the importer. It didn't imported the animation ids of unanimated bone properties. As a result you couldn't animate bones that weren't animated. So if you want to animate the marine model you need to import the marine again with the updated version of the importer.
Maybe the gun's relative position of your nova animation wasn't animated too and it's animation id didn't get imported.
Anyway, I made a marine wave animation for the story mode marine 01. Importimg m3a files as seperate model works now too. So you can open my attached animation and change it if you wanted too.
SM_Marine01 and SM_Nova import now properly. The SM_Marauder model can be imported without error messages too, but somehow some parts of the marauder are missing.
About the animation you made: I can have a look at it, but it might take a while till I find some free time for it. What is the animation for?
As the error message say: The export of multiple mesh objects isn't supported yet. If you want the model badly in SC2 you could export each mesh individually.
Export of multiple meshes is planned, but there are a few things I want to implement first. Like more material types, proper material-mesh-relations and Blender 2.63 support.
Thanks for your positive feedback. Can you name me some of the models which don't work?
Maybe even with error message? (You can copy and paste from a console if you enable it via the top left icon)
and the corresponding custom property definition for Blender(init.py) with descriptions:
phase1StartImageIndex=bpy.props.IntProperty(default=0,min=0,max=255,subtype="UNSIGNED",options=set(),description="Specifies the cell index shown at start of phase 1 when the image got divided into rows and collumns")phase1EndImageIndex=bpy.props.IntProperty(default=0,min=0,max=255,subtype="UNSIGNED",options=set(),description="Specifies the cell index shown at end of phase 1 when the image got divided into rows and collumns")phase2StartImageIndex=bpy.props.IntProperty(default=0,min=0,max=255,subtype="UNSIGNED",options=set(),description="Specifies the cell index shown at start of phase 2 when the image got divided into rows and collumns")phase2EndImageIndex=bpy.props.IntProperty(default=0,min=0,max=255,subtype="UNSIGNED",options=set(),description="Specifies the cell index shown at end of phase 2 when the image got divided into rows and collumns")relativePhase1Length=bpy.props.FloatProperty(default=1.0,min=0.0,max=1.0,subtype="FACTOR",name="relative phase 1 length",options=set(),description="A value of 0.4 means that 40% of the lifetime of the particle the phase 1 image animation will play")
Note that a special material is required to have particles actually play their animation.
@Leruster: Have you found the M3 Particle Systems panel of my m3 addon for Blender?
When you hover a particle system attribute with the mouse a tooltip will appear. I made descriptions for serveral particle system attributes. The toolip will also show you the name of the hovered attribute. The attribute name you can then use and compare it with the PAR_ structure definition in the structures.xml file.
There are btw. more structures relevant to particles. RIB_ structures can have SRIB elements. And particles can be influenced by forces specified in a FOR_ structure. I can once again really recommend to use my python scripts to convert the m3 files to xml to get a better understanding of their structure.
You don't need Blender to execute them. You just need to install python 3 and call them via command line.
The script printXml.py takes a m3 filename/filepath as argument and prints the xml to the command line. You can then redirect it into a file if you want to by appending "> filename". Possible ways to call the scripts (tested on a Linux system):
You can run the command in that syntax on Windows too if you use cygwin. Cygwin comes with an installer which allows you to install a lot of linux command line tools on a Windows machine and call them in a Linux like console. Besides python3 you could install that way git-core, git gui and gitk which makes it easy to get and update the m3addon I made. To download the code you would run:
git clone git://github.com/flo/m3addon.git
With "git fetch" you can download new changes and review them with the graphical tool "gitk" as a version tree. A right click on a node in the version tree allows you then to switch to clicked version of the m3addon.
I haven't tried to load that many models yet. Mostly I tried to load particle systems which worked pretty well.
The error message you posted came propably when you tried to load a model exported with 3ds max. I adjusted my addon so that it is hopefully compatible now. I also tried to load the immortal and the gateway. It didn't worked at first as it complained about some unknown structures. I added those structures to the structure.xml file to make those models load.
Sadly I noticed that there is some kind of strange performance issue when a model has a lot of M3 materials. If you experience those too, try to delete some M3 materials. I will investigate when I have time and propably create a bug report for Blender.
When you find any other model that doesn't load, please tell me.
Which Blender version are you using? Currently it works only properly with 2.62 since in 2.63 they introduced a new way of storing meshes which my addon can't deal properly yet.
When you receive erros when importing other models please report them either here or at the issue tracker at:
Generally the importer will always show an error message when it finds anything unexpected in the imported file. In most cases simple adjustments in the structure.xml file can make every model load.
I can't help you with the 3ds max addon, but you could give my m3 addon for Blender a try or try to convert it manually to xml and back to m3 with my python scripts. Latter is more difficulty but will very likly work.
@Kueken531:
Yes, you could make a throw animation, save it as a small m3a file.
The cool thing about making m3a files instead of just modifing models is, that you can make them so small: You don't need to include the mesh, attachment points nor all the other animations.
I haven't uploaded the videos to youtube since I don't like that google collects so much data. If curse would support it, the video I uploaded could also be embedded in the forum via HTML 5.
0
@Crainy: Go
The import of the SM_Marine03 model should work now with the newest version of my addon. Note that the newest version works only with Blender 2.63!
@DrSuperEvil: Go
The menu "File/Add File" can also be used to add m3a files when you select the correct file filter in the file selection dialog. Note that you need to add a m3 model first before adding a m3a animation to it.
0
@Bilxor: Go
Do you mean tutorial videos or videos of how an animated model looks like? Videos for both are linked in the first post.
0
@Wraith367: Go
In the "scene" tab of a properties editor in Blender there is a panel "M3 Material". Click "+" there and configure an diffuse image path in the "M3 Material Layers" panel. It's also an good idea to add an m3 animation in the "M3 Animations" panel since even static models have usualyl an animation.
0
@Crainy: Go
In the time line editor (per default visible at the bottom) you can set the start and end frame for the currently selected m3 animation. If Blender is configured to have 30 frames per second (automatically done when you import a m3) then a frame range 0 -59 would represent a 2 second long animation.
0
@Crainy: Go
Oh nice, didn't you can add m3a files in the previewer to models. That's a really nice feature.
I played around with creating nova animations and they seem right. In the blend file you attached there is no model so I can't confirm that the gun is actually in novas hand in Blender. But I suggest you don't post the whole model here because Blizzard has the copyright.
About attachment points: Their location and rotation and scale get represented by bones. So if you make a animation for a model you always make at the same time an animation for the attachment points of a model.
There was a bug in the importer. It didn't imported the animation ids of unanimated bone properties. As a result you couldn't animate bones that weren't animated. So if you want to animate the marine model you need to import the marine again with the updated version of the importer.
Maybe the gun's relative position of your nova animation wasn't animated too and it's animation id didn't get imported.
Anyway, I made a marine wave animation for the story mode marine 01. Importimg m3a files as seperate model works now too. So you can open my attached animation and change it if you wanted too.
0
@Crainy: Go
SM_Marine01 and SM_Nova import now properly. The SM_Marauder model can be imported without error messages too, but somehow some parts of the marauder are missing.
About the animation you made: I can have a look at it, but it might take a while till I find some free time for it. What is the animation for?
0
@Wraith367: Go
As the error message say: The export of multiple mesh objects isn't supported yet. If you want the model badly in SC2 you could export each mesh individually.
Export of multiple meshes is planned, but there are a few things I want to implement first. Like more material types, proper material-mesh-relations and Blender 2.63 support.
0
@Crainy: Go
Thanks for your positive feedback. Can you name me some of the models which don't work? Maybe even with error message? (You can copy and paste from a console if you enable it via the top left icon)
0
@maverck: Go It's not a speed value at all. It are image indices which get wrongly converted to floats(source: structures.xml):
and the corresponding custom property definition for Blender(init.py) with descriptions:
Note that a special material is required to have particles actually play their animation.
0
@Leruster: Have you found the M3 Particle Systems panel of my m3 addon for Blender?
When you hover a particle system attribute with the mouse a tooltip will appear. I made descriptions for serveral particle system attributes. The toolip will also show you the name of the hovered attribute. The attribute name you can then use and compare it with the PAR_ structure definition in the structures.xml file.
There are btw. more structures relevant to particles. RIB_ structures can have SRIB elements. And particles can be influenced by forces specified in a FOR_ structure. I can once again really recommend to use my python scripts to convert the m3 files to xml to get a better understanding of their structure. You don't need Blender to execute them. You just need to install python 3 and call them via command line.
The script printXml.py takes a m3 filename/filepath as argument and prints the xml to the command line. You can then redirect it into a file if you want to by appending "> filename". Possible ways to call the scripts (tested on a Linux system):
You can run the command in that syntax on Windows too if you use cygwin. Cygwin comes with an installer which allows you to install a lot of linux command line tools on a Windows machine and call them in a Linux like console. Besides python3 you could install that way git-core, git gui and gitk which makes it easy to get and update the m3addon I made. To download the code you would run:
With "git fetch" you can download new changes and review them with the graphical tool "gitk" as a version tree. A right click on a node in the version tree allows you then to switch to clicked version of the m3addon.
0
@maverck: Go
I haven't tried to load that many models yet. Mostly I tried to load particle systems which worked pretty well.
The error message you posted came propably when you tried to load a model exported with 3ds max. I adjusted my addon so that it is hopefully compatible now. I also tried to load the immortal and the gateway. It didn't worked at first as it complained about some unknown structures. I added those structures to the structure.xml file to make those models load.
Sadly I noticed that there is some kind of strange performance issue when a model has a lot of M3 materials. If you experience those too, try to delete some M3 materials. I will investigate when I have time and propably create a bug report for Blender.
When you find any other model that doesn't load, please tell me.
0
@maverck: Go
Which Blender version are you using? Currently it works only properly with 2.62 since in 2.63 they introduced a new way of storing meshes which my addon can't deal properly yet.
When you receive erros when importing other models please report them either here or at the issue tracker at:
https://github.com/flo/m3addon/
Generally the importer will always show an error message when it finds anything unexpected in the imported file. In most cases simple adjustments in the structure.xml file can make every model load.
0
For anyone who wants to work on m3 exporter/importer script:
I wrote some tools for converting m3 files to xml and xml back to m3 files. You can find them in my m3 addon for Blender:
@Aleksander23: Go
I can't help you with the 3ds max addon, but you could give my m3 addon for Blender a try or try to convert it manually to xml and back to m3 with my python scripts. Latter is more difficulty but will very likly work.
0
@Crainy:
Thanks for the feedback :D
@Kueken531:
Yes, you could make a throw animation, save it as a small m3a file.
The cool thing about making m3a files instead of just modifing models is, that you can make them so small: You don't need to include the mesh, attachment points nor all the other animations.
0
@DarlD: Go
Thanks for your feedback!
I haven't uploaded the videos to youtube since I don't like that google collects so much data. If curse would support it, the video I uploaded could also be embedded in the forum via HTML 5.