From a pirate's Arghh ... and all that, to testing Blender 2.93 and the Babylon Exporter

[gryff]

Trying to do lots of things … and I wandered into some Babylon videos that @PirateJC posted about “thin instances” that had a pirate ship/sea, and behind him a “Black Flag”. That triggered me to experiment with Blender 2.93 and @JCPalmer 's new exporter with animations (both skeletal and shapekeys).

So here is the result so far :

Arggh Shipmates

View in Firefox or Chrome (if you click the little “muted” icon in top left corner -see image below). Not tested on phones etc.

Off the bat, a question for @PirateJC, the “Black Flag” you use is not the traditional “skull and bones”, is it a Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts’ flag? Roberts is considered the most successful pirate by the number of ships he captured - over 400 , and used a number of different flags. Find one of his flags in the scene.

Two small animations - one skeletal, one shapekeys. The “Arghhs” from the early 1950s pirate movies - the actor Robert Newton.

Stay Safe All, gryff

Chrome Icon :

[PirateJC]

This is SUPER fun!

You had me at ARGGGH!!!

I see your hidden Black Bart flag! Ha!

My oversized Pirate Flag is a little less historical, and a little bit more Disney:

I made it years ago based off of the poster of one of the greatest movies of our time! LOL

[jelster]

Love the pirate’s sounds

[gryff]

Well, one of my motives in creating this demo was to test out @JCPalmer 's new Babylon Exporter for Blender 2.93 - and the above was my result. However, the basic one-legged walk needed improvement, and I thought it would be easy. But I have run into all kinds of complications. Here is my new walking around :

New Arrgh, Shipmates

There is more of an arch to the back like I have seen in old pirate movies - but I wanted the head to be more looking ahead, but I forgot to swing the half leg a little as well. I also wanted to create an animation to be played when the skeletal character stops to speak - but because of issues, that will have to come later

So, first I tackled the head looking up a bit - and ran into trouble. I took the animation and tried to adjust one of the head, neck or neck1 bones just slightly. Result :

Neck Adjusted Arrgh Shipmates

At this point I started looking at the exported .babylon files to see what the issue might be, as I had not received any warnings or error messages about the export.

First thing I noticed was that the skeletal animation was 54 frames long even though walking animaton in Blender is 24 frames, then I noticed that the “ranges” indicated that there were two ranges :

“ranges”:[{“name”:“KeyAction”,“from”:0,“to”:24},{“name”:“Pirate_base01aAction”,“from”:30,“to”:54}]}]

And it does not matter which range I use for the walk (they both work for walking) even though the “KeyAction” is the name given to the “animationGroups” driving the facial shapekey animation - not the skeletal animation.

I have spent several long sessions removing the walking animation and trying again with different bones - always the same type of result. I’m getting quite frustrated!

No idea what the problem is.

Stay Safe All, gryff

Edit: Oddly, the total vertex count is two different between the two new examples even though they start with the same Blender file and the only changes made are to the animation!