So, because of travel and work and other things numerous and sundry, I have not had tons of time for Mythruna since Christmas. During that time, I've been struggling with JME's relatively crappy asset pipeline.
"What is an asset pipeline?" you might ask. Well, that's the set of steps one uses to get a 3D model (or image, sound, whatever, but I'm talking models) into jMonkeyEngine for use in your apps. Most of the existing methods have various idiosyncrasies that make them painful in one way or another.
I kind of tried to start fixing this before Thanksgiving by attempting to support a new open standard called OpenGEX. I got as far as writing a general non-JME specific loader before I ran out of time on my self-imposed deadline. ie: I really wanted to work on Mythruna over Thanksgiving week and not be messing with file formats. So that work now sits unfinished.
When I last loaded the female model, I was able to get it to work with the straight-up Blender loader. I tried this with the male model and things didn't work at all... partially because this loader has been "enhanced" since I last used it and partially because my version of Blender is much newer. Various things were tried, including falling back to an older version of Blender, but have not met with much success.
So instead I've been using the Ogre exporter. Ogre is a completely different 3D engine and JME happens to support loading files in its format... but not without error or issue. Using this approach, I was at least able to load the male model but his animation skeleton is a bit screwed up. Most of this has to do with what each engine considers to be "up" but some of it has to do with how the parent-child relationships are handled on export and import.
Still, I've wasted enough time on this for what amounts to temporary models. The current loaded male will have to be "good enough" until I can swing back and fix him. There are still lots of problems but at least his resting pose looks almost right... if you ignore his hand attachments.
For context, here is the female model in rest post in my avatar tester app:
And here she is bent over:
That various lines and arrows are used by me to determine how different reference frames line up. For example, the yellow arrow coming out of her head tells me where the camera should be.
She still works fine even reskinned.
The male resting pose looks almost right:
The held items are completely wonky because for some reason (probably the "what is up" issue) yaw and roll are swapped or something.
It's even worse when he bends over because I've completely detached the head+hair from animation:
The hair is also not exactly in the right place in either pose... but close enough.
But as said, I need to move on from this. He's now good enough to at least show in the character creation book. Prior to this evening, his head floated a full two meters above his neck... except in one fixed case where he looked like he had no neck at all as his head sat right on top of his shoulders.
There are 100 other things to do and in the mean time JME and the rest of the world will evolve and perhaps the male model will "just work" in the future... like the female did.