Custom Blender Monsters for Amnesia

[The MasterNater]

Hi, all. So I've been successfully making models in blender for amnesia for a while now and I'm now finally tackling making a custom monster. I'm aware that Blender3D doesn't export animations well (only in .fbx format, which doesn't seem to work) so what I did was, I imported the existing "suitor" entity from Justine into blender and retextured it with a few small edits to make a new monster, assuming it could work with the same "suitor" animations. I made sure to parent the skeleton with the mesh and selected "include armatures" when exporting, but unfortunately none of the "suitor" animations work for it in the modelviewer or in the game. Can anyone give advice on this?

If I can find someone who has Maya and is willing to help out, I'd really prefer to have custom animations instead. But for now, it's probably easier just to get some help with this particular problem.

[WALP]

if the problem lies with the blender exporter importing a model will not bypass the issue, since you are still using the blender exporter.

If you can try and see if you can get a trial or student license for autodesk maya, and export your monsters from there.

EDIT: but if you are just looking to retexture it you can bypass this export stuff all together, by copying the files, renaming them, and editting the adresses inside the .dae. (note you may have to redo the .mat file)

[Spelos]

If your blender model has the rig working, you can make the animation and then export the model as .dae. If you then include this .dae in the "animations" folder with your model and change the type from yourexportedanimation.dae into yourexportedanimation.dae_ANIM , amnesia will work with it.

[Radiance]

What is max polygon count for the model to run smoothly in the game ?

[Spelos]

@brus
That highly depends on the System and amount of objects.
Generally, details in Amnesia seem to be created mainly by Normal Maps and Height/Bump maps.

As for the maximum, I can't tell.

[Radiance]

That highly depends on the System and amount of objects.
Generally, details in Amnesia seem to be created mainly by Normal Maps and Height/Bump maps.

The model has about 130 000 faces in Blender.
If I use Decimate, it quickly ruins the geometry on the mesh.

[WALP]

130 000 is probs a little too much, if I remember correctly the grunt has something like 2000-4000 faces. I would recommend staying below 10000.

Decimate is for lazy kids, you will have to build a low poly version around the high res mesh using fx snap to surface if you want to control the flow of geometry. Then you can bake the details of the 130k unto the below10k and most detail should be intact appart from the silhuette.

[Spelos]

Another way is to look in doing a retypology by hand. If the object is supposed to be animated, having nice low poly typology with the details baked onto it avoids rigging errors later on.

[The MasterNater]

Alright, I'm back. I tried Spelos's technique. The first thing I tried it on was a simple ceiling fan that was animated to rotate, and it actually worked just fine, exactly how it worked in blender.

I tried it out on my custom monster and it works... but its extremely broken and nowhere near usable. Although it's animated just fine in blender, the animation in the model viewer is vaguely the same, random polygons move that weren't supposed to while others that were supposed to move, don't. It just looks really distorted.

Any ideas on what might have gone wrong?

[Spelos]

Be sure that the MAIN .dae model is EXACTLY THE SAME as the .dae_ANIM model. That means the same applied armature.

And the best thing in your situation would be to take the whole main model and hit CTRL + A and select Apply Rotation, Location and then Scale, before you make the animation.

It happened to me a while back and I'm pretty sure applying these and re-importing worked.