I am wondering how far this has gone. There's very little info regarding importing characters into GG available to find. Even a Google search only seemed to find stuff from last year or early this year.
I've been playing around a little and managed to get these figures in. They are however static with no anims and even trying to add an AI script to them caused issues (vanishing mainly, or once slowly falling through the floor). Even so, they have transparency issues which so far I have been unable to fix when importing. I've tried setting transparency to 1,2 and 3 in the FPE with no difference at all, apart from one setting seemed to turn them blue and completely transparent in places...
We still have the really annoying transparency issue with some trees as well.



All the above look okay, the ones below show the glitches.



Has anyone had any luck getting similar models imported or experienced these issues? Is it just that the importer is still WIP? I am not sure how to proceed in trying to add animations and get this character running around as an npc or a 3rd person character yet. I was hoping to add the default anims initially using the append feature, but have not got round to trying that yet because of the weird vanishing and falling issues I found as soon as I tried to make the model dynamic.
As Lee asked about this awhile back, I am thinking he has yet to introduce a proper make human model import possibly. I haven't tried using anything other than an exported fbx model and they do not include animation of course. I would need to fix the transparency issue before I bothered with animations though.
I am liking the quality overall though and am keen to see some make human models in action! I've played with make human before but never really got into it beyond the default stuff included. I've spent a bit more time this time around and managed to get this Wonder Woman put together I did a Darth Vader one as well, but it looks much worse when imported (again, similar in that some parts on the cape vanish). Scale can be weird as well, make human models can be as small as an action figure or about half size in my tests so far. I have to scale them up in the importer at the moment to get them about right. That may be the source of the falling through the floor issue possibly. I had to scale the object from action man size.

This is all I could find on importing
(This is the November update )



Dave

Looking Great !!
There is this thread from pirate Myke and i think devlin has been getting a few in
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219217
Devlin has also been posting quite a few pics of his Make Human imports that i cant seem to find

@ Granada. I'm not even close to getting animations in I'm hoping the game mode bone skeleton will work when I try. I've had a quick play with animating the Wonder Woman toon in Blender with a basic idle type anim, but not tried to import that into GG yet. Needs a bit more work before I try that. I also would like to try appending the default anims to the model as a starting point, mainly to keep it in line with current AI.

@Syncromesh. Yeah I found that thread, but it's getting on a bit now and mostly concerns Fuse, which although I own, has been less useful since it was "updated". Unfortunately Fuse was a bit of a waste of cash So I didn't really read up much, perhaps I missed some relevant info. I too remember Devlan posting some shots but also couldn't find it, so I made this thread.

I really want to be able to use Make Human to make an npc, then either append the default anims to it (preferable on a purely speed basis) or animate in Blender and export to GG afterwards (better for customisation, but slow to do and I'm no Disney animator unfortunately).

Scale I have found to be an issue as stated previously. When I tried to scale the object in Blender it caused all sorts of issues with the eyes and teeth etc There seems to be no scale option in makehuman at all, I can only affect it with the centimetres/meters etc which so far I have managed to get the scale to about half the default in GG when using centimetres.

The transparency issues still need to be fixed imo, it's been a bug in GG since day one.

It only seems affected by the terrain and sky. Other objects behind it seem to work fine. Well, less pronounced.

Lees up for Make Human and has done some work with it …
Some talked about making our character with Make Human and the anims etc added via the importer as a starter ?

I was under the impression that with this latest update, that most of the promising ideas and work would have been done by this update on the importer to handle characters by now.
Sadly i was mistaken.
Hoping for a quick and Easy way to get the make human Characters in to GG

I would check to see if they are using the right effect\shader in the FPE

DNS: effect = effectbank\reloaded\tree_basic.fx
PBR: effect = effectbank\reloaded\apbr_tree.fx

Reliquia....

Try adding 'cullmode = 1' to the fpe to see if it fixes the transparency issues.

I have done some testing but had similar problems
the importer is not converting textures correct.
in the imported model fpe i removed the reference to the textures
one at a time looking for the error. i also removed the transparency
from the textures in uu3d this gave me better results.
have you tried loading the model using just a fpe from another model
not the importer, in .x format. are the textures in png format .

@ reliquia. I will have to check that. The trees are default media so really should work out the box, but as we know things get missed. I'll report back on my findings.
@ Gtox. I've tried that with no luck already I would imagine that is more a back face cull option rather than transparency, but have never paid it much attention in the past.
@ devlin. I've had a quick try using an old fpe and changing the model etc. Works as far as it goes. The character will follow me and flash away shooting from her body rather than her hand, as I have not setup any fire spot stuff, it just being a direct export from mh. Setting the scale in the FPE scales it, but also moves it above the floor at the same time.

The images are png, I've been trying to get them to import with as little fuss as possible, so converting all the textures to DDS is not something I want to do, yet. There must be something like 15 textures in all so a bit of a job. I don't think DDS will fix it though really in my heart of hearts. It really does only seem to get messed up by the terrain and skybox. Stand the npc in front of an object and all looks fine.
A couple of the default scenery items showing the white edge issue.

Another shot of WW, showing the obvious see thru parts when the sky is behind her head. The glow is from her firing at me.

The fact it is only the floor and skybox that cause these issues makes me think it is an engine issue still.

Yes i did report this in beta models scale movies model above terrain
even when you zero out or use transform tool, i think the importer
has some issues at the moment,

Just checking - are you using - apbr_character.fx for WW ?

I had transparency issues like this in the past but the "alphatocoverage" added to the above shader sorted it.

Cheers

I think that is where this shader came from afterwards.

character_transparency.fx
Have not tested it.

I've tried all of the above shaders today after reading your posts. They all look the same unfortunately. If you turn off the sky,water and terrain the model looks perfect.
Here the eyes and parts of the hair are clearly see through.

Here with a plane behind the npc it looks fine. At least with the eyes.

It's definitely only has an issue with the skybox etc.

I had a similar issue a few days ago, but only indoors with dynamic lights. Cullmode = 1 fixed the problem, which is why I thought it might help. I'm not sure it's the transparency settings - maybe the normals are flipped on the eyebrows and hair.

I had no luck when I tried it. Of course there are so many different options to try, I can't be sure if there's a magical mix that works. So it may work with different transparency settings than I had when I tried that. I've tried another model and it also suffers from the same texture transparencies not working.

Had a quick try at adding default animations but only get a crash I'm guessing the default game skeleton I'm using doesn't conform to the soldier ones. I'm not even sure if I can simply append the soldier onto a mh model at the second, which is was my first thought on quickly adding anims.

Just out of interest, what happens if you make the hair and eyelash textures completely black (or any colour, as long as there are no transparent parts). The results may narrow things down a bit, if nothing else.

I've sort of tried this with the eyebrows and eyelashes. If I paint the eyebrows completely black, they are fine (apart from a minor transparent edge which could probably be sorted with a quick expand). So yes, I can destroy the decent textures with my cruddy overpainted ones to solve this. I don't really want to of course, I want it to import as is. You can bet your bottom dollar the partial transparencies are the heart of the issue.

Remember of course that the transparency seems to work far better against objects rather than the skybox, terrain and water, so in a totally indoor map would look mostly fine (there might be a couple of fully transparent parts). I think the issue we seem to have here is that any partially transparent images are just being treated as fully transparent by the engine, at least as far as skybox etc are concerned.

Here's another attempt I made yesterday with a new npc. I wasn't expecting it to suddenly work, just wanted to see how it looked with different hair etc.

Hi Chaps,

The issue here is that the semi-transparent meshes of the model are being rendered first and the Z depth is written in before the head and other mesh parts have a chance to render themselves (rejected at the Z-buffer level). The solution is to reverse the order in which the meshes are rendered for models in the above scenario, and you can use the FPE field "reverseframes = 1" to make this happen for the entity.

If you are interested in learning about these largely undocumented nuggets, the best place to find them is by visiting the GItHub repo and browsing the file M-Entity.cpp, then search for "reverseframes" and you will see how this property is read in from the FPE file along with every other field you might be interested in.

I have started a new Wiki doc which references EVERY FPE field from the latest version: https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/wiki/FPE-Entity-Properties-Reference-Guide

I also have a little community task if someone is willing. I have attached the raw text for the above Wiki page, and if someone wants to flesh out the rest of the descriptions (the easy ones), I can then come back and fill in the trickier ones. We can then continue to expand this document as new fields are added and as new insights into using these properties emerge from the community. Also happy to credit the chosen author who has the patience to go through almost 200 fields and send me the updated text file

Hi
Since I'm not really English, I do not know if I understood everything correctly. I have already made character with makehuman, autodesk and mixamo and finally animated with mixamo. Mixamo models are very polygonlastig, so I do not like that. My workflow is as follows. I make my character, save it (best in T-pose) as. Obj. I once created a gg-character as obj (because of the size). Then I pull the model into the respective size, save again as obj. In mixamo I let it animate (my choice). Export as fbx. I convert the animated fbx model with the fbx-converter from autodesk to fbx2010 (newer fbx does not accept fragmotion). Then as I said fragmotion. There you can miss the model all its movements and summarize it to an animation. Then comes the last gear, the export to .x. I did not have any problems with the transparencies in character. Well, I try to avoid eccentric haircuts, which also consume a lot of poly's. Another way to avoid the hair-transparency flaws: put a level with the skin color (maybe a little darker) under the hair. With close-fitting hair that may not be so noticeable. Well except in the rear area. I have not tried that yet so can not say what that looks like.

And with trees and other transparent things the apbr-tree.fx works quite well. But not if an illum.dds is included. Or I have misunderstood everything now. Then just ignore my gibberish. But if I'm right and just not understood, I have to come up with something to make it better translate.

I'll bear your workflow in mind Lafette II, but I use Blender rather than 3DS Max and am having a horrible time when importing a make human model from Blender. I'll check out the rogue trees and see if that shader fixes em, they are default old media so may well have not been updated.

Most of these tests have been a direct make human to GG so far, as Blender introduces other issues (the character is far too big, scaling n Blender goes crazy, scaling in GG makes the character start up out of sight and end up falling through the floor ) This is of course much down to me not knowing what I am doing, and importing bone rigs from make human, but I feel many of us GG users here will be in a similar boat when it comes to adding rigged entities.

The reverseframes option fixed the eyes so thanks for the pointer Lee I had seen that in the fpe settings but I thought it was to reverse the animation frames in some fashion I still get issues with the hair, transparent parts in front of other parts end up see through, rather than showing the hair behind. I can also still see through it to the characters back and such.

I also found if you use the apbr_anim8bone.fx it seems to set the object correctly directly from the importer. I found this when trying to import an animated model. No luck at all with getting the model to work properly, but it looks ok, when I finally get to find it, lol. The main issue I have had is getting the scale correct It doesn't help that I have to reload GG every time I change the model. Small fpe changes will work by simply reloading a blank level generally, but often it needs to be re-loaded.

As PCS stated above, I'm mainly interested in a simple way to get animated npc's into GG. It's definitely not an easy task. The importer is better and the models look great when imported, but at the second it is just a way for me to import a fancy statue. I can import the mh rig into Blender and animate it, but importing the final thing into GG just does not seem to work at all. I'm using the game mode rig in make human (there are more advanced ones (other bones to control er, bits that aren't strictly bones), but I figured the game one would be the best starting point).

Does anyone know what the error message means when I tried to append the ubersoldiers anims to the wonderwoman npc? Would it be bone names or the number of them? Or simply the fact it is a different model? I've pretty much given up importing a Blender animated toon in at this point. I might even start to look at making cc parts instead, which may be easier.

Are you exporting from Blender as .FBX or .X?

The .FBX version exported from Blender is a very old version which isn't very compatible with modern versions, hopefully this will get updated with the new 2.8 version of Blender.

Also as to the hair, it might be that the hair is a series of single planes and you're seeing the back face of the plane which renders transparent, there's a command to turn backfaces on in fpe's i forget what it is, cullmode or something.

I've been using fbx as that's where the main work for the importer has been put in as far as I know. I can try .x, I should have tried it awhile back me-thinks :/ Still I think there is some issue with the fbx model that make human makes, as I cannot scale it in Blender without affecting it's position for some reason. Probably the bones causing some issue, although I'm trying to scale them all together. It's a pity the scale is wrong for GG

I've tried cullmode=0 and 1 to no avail for the issues I've been having, but maybe that would fix my Darth Vader toon so the cape is visible I gave up quick with that one when I saw it.

I think the cullmode setting is 3, but i'm not sure it's been a while.

Really? That's annoying. GG does really suffer from too many options on the fpe side, I've never seen the like in any other programming language or game engine I've used. I've also just checked the list syncromesh put up and am either missing it (cullmode) or it is not listed. I just noticed a smoothing normals options as well, which really I can't see the point of you would do that in your 3D package or should do. I'll have to check out the list Lee posted to see if the options are listed there.

It's listed in the github list that Lee posted a couple of posts up...



Basically what it's for is what modelling packages call Back Face Culling, this is a process whereby toggling it on or off chooses whether to render the back of a polygon face with the same texture as the front of the face, or to not render a texture on the back of the face, making it invisible.

Whether it is part of your issue or not, i don't know, just something to try.

As to the numbers used to turn it on and off, i really can't remember, but i have a vague recollection of the number 3 with regards to one of the settings, not sure if i'm mixing it up with something else or not though.

I think it is cullmode = 1 as Gtox said. At least that has worked for me. If setting it to 3 does something else will have to explore.

Re hair transparency issue the only way I could get this to work was to use ‘alphatocoverage’ blend in the shaders - it looks like this suggestion has now been removed from the stock pbr shader though.

On your animations - are you trying to apply stock GG soldier anims to a MH model consisting of a different rig?

Cheers.

Probably, lol. I was using the rig included with the make human export in the hope it was close enough, as apart from the issues getting the object into GG from Blender, the rig worked great and was ready to go. It was a quick way to try to add the anims in really, I didn't expect it to work properly, but the error message is not very descriptive in showing what is wrong.

I don't think you'll get that to work - animations are tightly bound to the rig bone names and starting angles/positions.

What the new stuff allows is for single animations to be added individually in the fpe or via lua rather than before when they all had to be appended to together and referenced by start, end frame positions.

Re the transparency thing - if you've got time you could try the attached out to see if the alphatocoverage sorts your characters hair transparency out. May not, but it worked for me. In fpe: effect = effectbank\reloaded\apbr_character.fx and take a copy of apbr_core.fx before replacing with the one attached.

Cheers.

Hmm, tried the shader and that just seems to cause the character to completely vanish, on a non boned version that is. I tried it on the rigged version and it seems to have worked, but really hard to tell 100%, as it's falling through the floor (after a drop of skyscraper height). I have to turn the floor off to see her atm after about 10 to 20 seconds of falling that is.

I set her to immobile so I can see the difference properly. It works, but seems to have half burned her eyebrows and lashes off.

This is how I got it before with a static object and reverseframes.

This is where she ends up when I don't set her to immobile, even when set as static. This is rigged in Makehuman and loaded from Blender as fbx. No animations, but I wanted to get her in okay before I started on that (bar my append test).

Yes if you’re using the new ‘8 bone’ shader the one I attached won’t work properly it needs another define set in the apbr_character.fx

It doesn’t look like much improvement anyway - just thought it was worth a try

Cheers.

Not at all, I'm happy for the suggestions and help. I was really only trying to test the new importer and see if it was indeed easier to get an animated character in. Seems it isn't and still needs a fairly savvy 3D character artist to get any decent results

I actually replaced the 8 bone shader with your one for this as well, obviously

My concern here is that I consider myself a fairly advanced GG user (I'm weak at bone animations I'll admit, although I'm a pretty good with old fashioned limb rotation stuff) and if I am having issues, I can well understand newbies having no chance whatsoever