Anyone know how to do hard points in blender?

[Clavin12]

I found it! The pivot editor. Haven't fixed my problem yet but its progress.

[Warfreak]

That isn't exactly a pivot editor: IE. you CANNOT rotate JUST the pivot, all it does is show you where the pivot it. (IOW: shows the object center).

[Dianoga4]

Yea what Warfreak said. It doesn't let you change just the pivot, it changes where the pivot point is of the object or multiple objects.

Clavin you should really just post the blend file so we could have a look.

[Clavin12]

http://cid-9b463da68c89eea0.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/Car.blend

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

It sounds like the pivot points need to be reset to 0 0 0; anything other then these values will indeed screw things up with eyepoints and hardpoints. Select the object and right-click on the object properties dialogue. This should display the X Y Z values for the object. Typically, I see values like -90, -180, etc. This occurs when you the modeller rotate stuff in the workspace.

May or may not be relevent, but in TS there's a tool that does several things like move the axis to the center of the object, normalizes the rotation to 0 0 0, and toggles the axis to display or not display. Blender must also have these basic tools, so try to locate them and use them often to keep tabs on rotation values; this used to be a source of headaches for me before I understood what pivot points even did. I used to get really frustrated when my ships were prepared for BZII only to appear wrongly oriented in game.

[Dianoga4]

What version of Blender are you using? I found that the eyepoint was working fine as well as the guns. The part that was not pointing the right way was the body itself. When trying it in the editor, the ship was facing nose down like mine did in my example in the previous thread. The eyepoint was pointing straight and the guns were shooting straight. I rotated the vertices of the body like I explained in the previous post and then everything was working correctly.

Here is the blend after I changed it. See if it works for you. You'll have to change the texture names because I had to use different ones.

http://www.pvuploads.com/Clients/LordWrathX/Car%20fixed.blend

[Clavin12]

Thanks alot. It works fine. Idk what I did wrong but I'm gonna keep this and simply change the geometry and odfs for my hover ships. But one thing. How do you import another blend file into the first blend file?

[Dianoga4]

No problem, glad it works now. You can "Append" objects from one blend file to another by going up to file and pressing Append or by pressing Shift-F1. You then browse to the blend file you want something from, go to the object folder and pick what you want. I believe you can only append one thing at a time.

[Clavin12]

Ok so that works. How do you get the hardpoints to stay still when assigning a parent?

[Dianoga4]

I'm not sure what you mean by getting them to stay still.

[Clavin12]

When I assign a parent to a hardpoint it changes the rotation, location, and scale of the hardpoint. IDK how to remove this effect.

Btw: Could you do the same thing with this ship as you did with he other? I need to see what you do. This one appears all tilted and rotated in game but in blender all the rotations and stuff are correct. I think it might have to do with the objects center being rotated wrong. http://cid-9b463da68c89eea0.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/Bowman%20Fixed.blend

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

Looking at your model in Blender I see the x y rotation values at 90 and -90; these need to be reset to 0 0 prior to exporting. As far as I know BZII will display them as you have them but the orientation in game will probably not look right as you've already noted.

[Dianoga4]

Here is the bowman fixed....

http://www.pvuploads.com/Clients/LordWrathX/Bowman%20Fixed2.blend

It looks like you used the hardpoints from the last model. I ended up just making a new eyepoint and com. This one was pretty out of whack.

Has anyone ever told you that when you make changes to the models that you have already tried in the game that you have to delete the MSH file in the binData folder or else it will still keep using the same model over and over? I just thought of that now because you were saying that no matter what you did, nothing seemed to change. That could be why if you haven't been doing that. I just thought of it now because I'm so used to doing it that I don't even think of it anymore lol.

[Avatar]

If you're using 1.3 it does check to see if the XSI is newer than the MSH, and builds a new MSH if that's true.

This does NOT hold true for all of the XSI's used in a complex model, for example if you make a new strafe animation but don't change any of the other anims you will still need to manually delete the MSH file to get the engine to build a new one.

-Av-

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

It does sound like the old MSH file is being used even though C12 is changing stuff on the model. I remember getting confused on my own models when I'd make changes to a model, but forget to delete the old MSH file. A good rule of thumb when updating a model is to delete the old file and let BZII make a new one. Another option would be to archive the old MSH files outside of the BZII install folder although I can't imagine why anyone would want to save a screwed up MSH anyways?