Milkshape to Moviestorm, getting (animated) props on set, A tutorial on importing meshes through Milkshape in to Moviestorm

[lucindamc123]

Help needed with this. I made an animated child and I did everything in Milkshape and followed the tutorial for importing into Moviestorm, however, the materials don't show up. Everything else does though. So I don't know what I did wrong. The mesh, animations and everything else shows up and it looks like the materials are there but nothing shows up on the grid in the Modder's Workshop.

[Chris Ollis]

I'd say go through the material assigning steps again - assign the materials to the groups, then export the materials and finally the mesh.

[lucindamc123]

I'd say go through the material assigning steps again - assign the materials to the groups, then export the materials and finally the mesh.

Yes I am dong that now. The way I had to design this in order to place joints on everything, with the body parts that just had the skin texture, i had to group them, i.e. shoulder, upper arm, lower arm, hand, thigh,knee,lower leg, etc. And since it imported each texture as a separate texture I thought i was supposed to assign each group to the correct texture but since for the skin it is really only one image texture file, I am going through and assigning the same jpg file that was imported to each body part. That should make a difference, since there are only the skin, dress, shoes, face and hair for textures. I will see if that will work.

[lucindamc123]

It still did not work and I am sure I exported everything correctly as everything shows up in the folder where I copied them just not in the Modder's Workshop. Maybe we just won't be able to import animated characters into Moviestorm. I can't think of anything I did wrong in creating this and the mesh shows up and the animations.

[primaveranz]

The galloping horses I did were done in Milkshape Lucinda, so I'm sure you will be able to do children unless the mesh is too large. What size is your material texture file? I had problems with them when they were too large and .jpgs are not great for MS anyway. Convert the texture to a .dds file and make sure its sides are multiples of 2. Also did you export all your groups as a single mesh, you can do this if you select all the groups at the same time before you click "export".

[lucindamc123]

The galloping horses I did were done in Milkshape Lucinda, so I'm sure you will be able to do children unless the mesh is too large. What size is your material texture file? I had problems with them when they were too large and .jpgs are not great for MS anyway. Convert the texture to a .dds file and make sure its sides are multiples of 2. Also did you export all your groups as a single mesh, you can do this if you select all the groups at the same time before you click "export".

Can I convert the texture files while the model is in Milkshape and change the sizes because Sketchup does not recognize dds files and also I can't change the size of the texture file while in Sketchup as it will mess up the model? It saved it as one mesh file. I think it is the textures. The Sketchup model imports fine into Moviestorm, just not the Milkshape one that I have exported as Cal 3d. Oh I am glad you are allright as we heard there was a earthquake where you live.

[primaveranz]

Yes just create a copy of the texture in your paint program and save it as a .dds. Then in MilkShape you create a New Material and choose the .dds copy as your texture file. Chris goes into detail on how to do this in his tutorial or you can check out YouTube. The naming is important for MS, it must have a name like "Skin[0]" etc.
You should just create a single material and apply the same one to each of your groups. Then go to "Window" , "Texture Coordinate Editor" to rotate, scale and align the appropriate bit of the texture with that group. Again, Chris's tutorial on applying a single texture to a cube "die" is pretty much all you need to align the texture.

One "trick for young players" I have found, is that when you finally import it into Modders Workshop, sometimes the texture will be flipped through 180 degrees on the material. Just go back to your paint program and flip the texture image (and any normals) and it will work fine.

And thanks to everyone that sent their thoughts re the earthquake, we did have to run out of the house in the middle of the night but it was a bit of a fizzer surprisingly, given its apparent size and shallowness. Still no reports of damage or injuries anywhere so it looks like we were lucky yet again. Poor old Christchurch, New Zealand had another belt not long afterwards though. Their city centre must be on less stable ground than Port Vila.

[lucindamc123]

Yes just create a copy of the texture in your paint program and save it as a .dds. Then in MilkShape you create a New Material and choose the .dds copy as your texture file. Chris goes into detail on how to do this in his tutorial or you can check out YouTube. The naming is important for MS, it must have a name like "Skin[0]" etc.
You should just create a single material and apply the same one to each of your groups. Then go to "Window" , "Texture Coordinate Editor" to rotate, scale and align the appropriate bit of the texture with that group. Again, Chris's tutorial on applying a single texture to a cube "die" is pretty much all you need to align the texture.

One "trick for young players" I have found, is that when you finally import it into Modders Workshop, sometimes the texture will be flipped through 180 degrees on the material. Just go back to your paint program and flip the texture image (and any normals) and it will work fine.

And thanks to everyone that sent their thoughts re the earthquake, we did have to run out of the house in the middle of the night but it was a bit of a fizzer surprisingly, given its apparent size and shallowness. Still no reports of damage or injuries anywhere so it looks like we were lucky yet again. Poor old Christchurch, New Zealand had another belt not long afterwards though. Their city centre must be on less stable ground than Port Vila.

Yes I did create them as dds files after resizing the original textures and I deleted the old textures and replaced them with the dds textures in Milkshape and exported everything fine. So now I will see if they work or not and will follow the instructions in case the textures are upside down per the tutorial. Wish me luck. Believe it or not I have done 17 versions of this one child just to get one animation done in Milkshape. It is just a simple walking animation but I wanted to see if it would work and I could figure out how to import into Moviestorm. I will make better animations for the addon I will release if this one does import fine. I have Photoshop and I have the DDS plugin for it so I can make dds files right from Photoshop. I just didn't know if you could replace them in the Milkshape program or not and they look just fine. No problems at all with the textures. thanks a lot and I am glad you are all okay over there.

[lucindamc123]

It still didn't work. I have all the materials seleted and there are only 6 and nothing is happening. There is a -1 in front of all the material names in the list. What does that mean?

[primaveranz]

What names did you give your materials in Milkshape? Did you put the numerix suffix in square brackets for each one?

Can you post a screen dump of Milkshape showing the "Model", then "Groups" then "Materials" windows open.


If you get totally stuck send it to me and I will see if I can figure it out.

[lucindamc123]

What names did you give your materials in Milkshape? Did you put the numerix suffix in square brackets for each one?

Can you post a screen dump of Milkshape showing the "Model", then "Groups" then "Materials" windows open.


If you get totally stuck send it to me and I will see if I can figure it out.

No I didn't put the numerix suffix in square brackets for each one. I just named them Material2,3,4,etc for each one. I will go back and rename them. Do they need to be named the same name as the actual texture image?

[lucindamc123]

It worked! Problem now is she is lying flat on the ground instead of standing up but I know what I did wrong. The prop is supposed to look like ti is lying flat on the ground in Milkshape and that will make it import as standing up as the axis are strange in Milkshape. Same problem Chris had with the Robobot. Will make it harder to animate but I think I can do it. At least the materials imported and I know what to do now. Thanks so much. Hopefully by the end of the day I will have the very first ever Moveistorm animated child available for everyone. And of course she is my daughter Danielle. Primaverez if any of the kids you work with would like animated puppets who look like them, let me know. All I need is a full front face photo of their face to do it, and age and height and weight, boy or girl. Moveistorm this will also be great for schools because I know a lot of kids would love to have puppets who look like them in their movies.

[lucindamc123]

I got it to work finally and now that I know how to do it, I plan to make a lot of animated characters and animals for you all to use. Right now I am replacing the animation I did with this first child with another one was I didn't care for the animation I did. This is just a simple walking animation. As I learn Milkshape better I will be able to create better animations. It isn't that difficult but the problem is getting close enough view of your puppet in Milkshape to see where the joints are all moving because sometimes they detach from the body and that doesn't look good at all.

[lucindamc123]

And here is the first Moviestorm animated child. I am still learning animation in Milkshape so this is just a simple walking animation but as i get better, I will be able to do a lot of animated characters for use with Moviestorm.

But I did learn how to import animated props into Moviestorm and am happy to say that it was not as difficult as I thought it would be thanks to Chris great tutorial.

http://www.moviestorm.co.uk/community/inde...p;vid_id=106237