[REQ] The whole Sphere bones, Y and Z thing.

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Reoxur 1 Feb, 2020 @ 8:08am

[REQ] The whole Sphere bones, Y and Z thing.

Years ago I asked about the Sphere bones in Blender and rotated bones n such, so I'm gonna ask about it again.

I noticed you have this planned "Rotate a mesh and skeleton by a user-specified angle (to deal with Maya using y-axis as up)." and related stuff.

Has this to do with the Bone axis of Blenders Y forward versus Industry-standard Z forward? (Or I mean Z up and Y up)

I remember you said if you rotated the bones upon import, that it would confuse people and only work in Blender.

Well the addon is for Blender and we are Blender users, we don't care about compatibility with 3ds Max or Maya.

Sphere bones do more harm anyway, there are countless first time Player model riggers that try to Auto Rig using Sphere bones and result in wonky arms.
Then they learn that they've got to deal with a Sphere bone mess and can't even add new bones because they have to study what orientation its meant to be. Not to mention there's no Symmetry because of the bone names and trouble using bone constraints because the bones are orientated to another Softwares preference.

I've come across people on the Blender forums that hate Source's bone orientation because of the result in Blender, we do know its Blenders fault for not following the industry standard.

When I ask if they could give options to change the orientation, they tell me its the job of the Import-Export developer.

I have to work around the garbage by using another skeleton made in Blender and swapping its names to something more friendly like Forearm.L using a Script, just so I can have symmetrical weight painting.

TLDR: Please reconsider, Sphere bones are not helping anyone, it confuses people more, people dislike it, it's not friendly, we just want bone orientation swapping feature and we don't care about if it doesn't work anywhere else but Blender, we are Blender users and its a Blender addon.

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Showing 1-8 of 8 comments

Pte Jack 1 Feb, 2020 @ 11:00am

I have no idea what you mean by Sphere bones, maybe a screenshot of what these are might help.

As for the Y, Z thing, most importers and exporters give you options to set the up axis, be it Y up, Z or -Z forward or Z up, -Y forward. You just have to set the options to import the model to the Up Axis you want it to be. The rotations of a model all depend on how the original author of the model exported it and and what the up axis is for the game engine or purpose it was developed for. So, this is not a Blender thing other than the Blender default being Z Up and -Y Forward and the other popular 3D editors being Y up and Z forward.

This will always be a problem, but manageable, You just have to remember that 7 on the pad is front instead of Top View, and 1 is Top view instead of Front view.

Reoxur 2 Feb, 2020 @ 12:46am

Originally posted by Pte Jack:
I have no idea what you mean by Sphere bones, maybe a screenshot of what these are might help.

As for the Y, Z thing, most importers and exporters give you options to set the up axis, be it Y up, Z or -Z forward or Z up, -Y forward. You just have to set the options to import the model to the Up Axis you want it to be. The rotations of a model all depend on how the original author of the model exported it and and what the up axis is for the game engine or purpose it was developed for. So, this is not a Blender thing other than the Blender default being Z Up and -Y Forward and the other popular 3D editors being Y up and Z forward.

This will always be a problem, but manageable, You just have to remember that 7 on the pad is front instead of Top View, and 1 is Top view instead of Front view.

If you haven't seen SMD imported into Blender then have you even used Blender Source Tools?

And no this has nothing to do with X Y Z of the model, its the bone orientations, Blender Source Tools doesn't flip their axis, leaving us with a mess of tiny rotated bones.

This is a problem to do with Blenders Bone Axis, so the addon NEEDs to support bone axis flipping so we can have normal bones...

Reoxur 2 Feb, 2020 @ 12:53am

Heres what we have to deal with since the beginning

https://imgur.com/a/l1Cryvv

Artfunkel

4 Feb, 2020 @ 4:01am

It's not just working with other programs that causes trouble, it's interacting with the data that they produce. If the importer messes with the bones in the reference mesh and then you try to import an animation later on, the imported data will be junk.

If you want to just make a tweak to a model and then use it with the same animations as before, a very common use case, then the bones need to round-trip correctly.

Creating Blender bones isn't just a matter of rotating things, either. Bones do not actually have a rotation, but a head and a tail location. And that head points up to the parent bone. It's frequently impossible to generate a good result programatically because the script doesn't know where to put the other end of the bone.

Properly converting skeletons to Blender's wacky skeleton format is destructive and for that reason will never be done by the Source Tools. You are free to write a second script that does the work, but it won't be easy.

chanoc 28 Feb, 2020 @ 10:50am

I've asked about this before and yeah, it sucks.
However there are some addons that can import skeletons "correctly".
REDxEYE's SourceIO has an option to "Normalize bones", which results in this: https://files.catbox.moe/89jw2r.png
Which actually looks pretty nice and is great to work with, except like Artfunkel said, it breaks existing animations, so personally it's usless for me to rig things to an existing skeleton. Additionally, the tips of bone chains dont have their proper rotations, (probably because it doesnt know where to put the tip of the bone), as seen here: https://files.catbox.moe/psr6q0.png
Very frustrating.
Maybe one day, through collaboration or something we'll be able to have proper imported Source skeletons in Blender. Until then we're going to have to deal with manually weight painting everything.

Reoxur 28 Feb, 2020 @ 12:10pm

Originally posted by chanoc:
I've asked about this before and yeah, it sucks.
However there are some addons that can import skeletons "correctly".
REDxEYE's SourceIO has an option to "Normalize bones", which results in this: https://files.catbox.moe/89jw2r.png
Which actually looks pretty nice and is great to work with, except like Artfunkel said, it breaks existing animations, so personally it's usless for me to rig things to an existing skeleton. Additionally, the tips of bone chains dont have their proper rotations, (probably because it doesnt know where to put the tip of the bone), as seen here: https://files.catbox.moe/psr6q0.png
Very frustrating.
Maybe one day, through collaboration or something we'll be able to have proper imported Source skeletons in Blender. Until then we're going to have to deal with manually weight painting everything.

I use a rigging skeleton which is just a normal skeleton renamed to Valve bones, I use it to auto weight with.

And then I use a script to rename the entire skeleton to something symmetrical with .R and .L
Do the weight painting n such.
Then swap the skeleton back to the sphere bones skeleton.
Auto rename them back.

chanoc 28 Feb, 2020 @ 1:36pm

Originally posted by Reoxur:
I use a rigging skeleton which is just a normal skeleton renamed to Valve bones, I use it to auto weight with.

And then I use a script to rename the entire skeleton to something symmetrical with .R and .L
Do the weight painting n such.
Then swap the skeleton back to the sphere bones skeleton.
Auto rename them back.

Mind sharing the script + .blend?

Reoxur 29 Feb, 2020 @ 12:54am

Originally posted by chanoc:
Originally posted by Reoxur:
I use a rigging skeleton which is just a normal skeleton renamed to Valve bones, I use it to auto weight with.

And then I use a script to rename the entire skeleton to something symmetrical with .R and .L
Do the weight painting n such.
Then swap the skeleton back to the sphere bones skeleton.
Auto rename them back.
Mind sharing the script + .blend?

Sure, I'll package them

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Date Posted: 1 Feb, 2020 @ 8:08am

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