Almost went crazy today because of this. I made the lods of my game avatar months ago, but recently I improved my animations and changed the skeleton a bit because of that.

But parts of the animation were not visible and I couldn't figure out why. In the end I found the problem, with help from some other EE users. So lods are not updated when you change the skeleton, and that might cause problems.

I wonder if it would be a good idea to regenerate them automatically after changing the skeleton? I won't make that same mistake twice, but I can imagine sooner or later someone else is banging his head against the wall because of this.

Actually it is not only about skeleton, but change of material, scale, etc...When I change scale of main object, LODs are still small and I have to rescale them in original file and import again. Quite bothering, but if you know about this behaviour, you can modify your pipeline to mitigate this.

@Demostenes, If i understand you correct. You shall not scale and do so through editor.. if you do it all by code it's alot easier and i've never had troubles with that... Material changing is really simple if your Parts for the models aren't grouped.

however Yvans problem, wasn't nothing about this.. He is basically just had troubles with the drawing, his hand animation wasn't drawing until he zoomed in like into fps mode. that's one thing Esenthel needs to fix.. i've done alot of custom animations, and they all worked perfectly fine.. though it didn't work for Yvans models / animations.. And that's due to it didn't get "Drawn" until he zoomed in,. i'm sure there's a code for this to fix. but it's still something nice esenthel could fix.

i'm not 100% this is yvans problem but yeah

I've checked the engine codes and lod's should have adjusted bone indexes as well.
@yvands: can you confirm that like TBJokers said the problem was not about it?

@TBJokers: perhaps you're refering to the animation optimization that disables animations for face/hands due to Game::Chr::
virtual Flt animateFaceBlend (); // facial animation blending value, dependent on character visibility and distance from camera, returns value 0..1 (0 disables facial animation), you can override this method and return your custom values
virtual Bool animateFingers (); // if animate hand/foot fingers , dependent on character visibility and distance from camera, returns value true/false (false disables hands animation), you can override this method and return your custom values

which can be overriden and return custom values

@Demostenes: I've just checked scaling on the whole mesh, and all lods get scaled as well.
For changing only some parts scale/materials this won't work, because each lod can have completely different set of Mesh Parts, and they are not 1:1 reference to the original mesh parts, so they are not adjusted automatically.

I'm not sure if it was the bone index or something related to it. But I made a backup yesterday, so I can show the version that doesn't display as it should. I'll attach a zip file with the mesh, skeleton and a few animations.

If you replace the avatar in sample.world with this, you will see what I mean. And by regeneration the lods, the problem is fixed.


  avatar_example.7z (Size: 213.9 KB / Downloads: 3)

Thanks for looking into this.

your lods seem different than the 1st lod only in terms of mesh parts placement, and hand faces are reversed, it's not related to bone indexes, they're just different and wrong hand faces
besides that, animations play fine on all lod stages

Odd. The hands are really not animated when I use these files with the 'world with character' tutorial. Only after lod regeneration all is fine. But ok, it might be better to remove this from 'feature requests'.