Modeling and Skinning in Blender

[razvanab]

I have found some good tutorial of modeling and skinning for Unreal in Blender

http://code.google.com/p/steam-punk-pirates-mod/wiki/TutorialPage

Good Luck !

[devix91]

How lovely! this will definitely help a lot.

thank you

[Xero]

Awesome! Thanks dude this will coming very handy.

[Evilmatt]

Hi there,

I'm the guy that wrote those tutorials. They were written for mods in UT3 but I assume they will work just as well for UDK. I've not had a chance to try UDK out yet as it won't install on my machine.

If you have any comments or suggestions or spot any errors feel free to let me know and I can correct things, google code has a comments system but it doesn't alert me when someone adds things so I usually miss any comments people put there.

Anyway hopefully those tut's will be useful to people :)

[razvanab]

those tuts help me a lot so thank you :)

[sueds]

I'm not sure but your tutiorial is not really about custom animated character or custom animation right ?

[Evilmatt]

It shows how to make a custom character using the existing animations and skeleton structure used by epic.

[razvanab]

It shows how to make a custom character using the existing animations and skeleton structure used by epic.

Hi Evilmatt

can you please tell me if this rig is ok for UDK ?

http://www.box.net/shared/7l7kujifnj

[sueds]

this rig is terrible. I don't know how you plan to animate character that way. Do you need a tutorial on how to rig a game character ?

[razvanab]

i know how to rig but i was trying to use the UDN rig without make it from scratch by importing a psk model into blender

[Evilmatt]

At a quick glance at it looks like it has all the right names and rough positions. It also matches the rough dimensions of my own rig that worked. So I would think you have a good chance with it :)

The only way to be sure is to try it out though. I had to go through 5 or 6 iterations of my blender rig before I got something that worked in ut3 and didn't turn my models inside out. Some of that was orientation issues with the differences between blender bones and unreal's skeletons and some of that was stupid mistakes though so you will probably have better luck :D

sueds: I would agree the rig looks pretty odd partly that's the difference in the way the epic rig handles bones and the way blender does. From what I can gather the original max and maya rigs for characters use a completely different set of bones that do the actual deforming these are then linked to a set of empties that represent bones in UE3. In blender because of the way the exporter is set up we have bones in place of the empties which ends up looking pretty odd. Using a rig like this is only a way to make use of the inbuilt animations epic have already done to save time, you don't have to make all the animations required to make a character work just make your mesh weight it to the skeleton and export it.

[razvanab]

looks like there are missing bones in the rig too if you just import the psk into blender

[rysakai1]

Thank you so much, I've been looking for some good tutorials for using Blender. My 30 trial period with 3DS Max is almost up and I'm afraid I don't have $3500 to buy a full license.

[ICEBreaker42]

looking at the rig, will it work? I dont think the axis are set up properly.
Looking at this rig:
http://code.google.com/p/steam-punk-pirates-mod/wiki/CustomCharacter

it looks like the UDK has the X axis point to the next bone, whereas your armature is built using blenders standard of Y pointing to the next bone.

anyone tested it yet? or does the exporter change out the axis rotations?
oh, and Which exporter are you using?

[razvanab]

i use this as exporter for psk/psa
http://www.filefront.com/14844549/v0.0.13-Blender-export_psk_psa.rar/

[razvanab]

I have found a way to bring the udn/ut3 rig in blender using MilkShape :)
You just need to load the rig in MilkShape and save it as ms3d and then import the file in blender.

http://www.box.net/shared/jokxm45jqy