Hello there,

Another noob question here. Sorry once again since I'm sure the answer is quite obvious and I'm just completely missing something.

How can I make character models work in Esenthel besides the ones that are made by Esenthel? To be clear, I have copied and pasted much of the code from the Esenthel RPG 2 source and have no problem replacing the available characters to choose at start. However, if I put a model there that is from a different source (Turbosquid), first they appear with their arms stretched out in the character choice screen, and then if I choose them, the game throws an error that says: point "HandL" not found in skeleton. I do realize of course, that it would be naive to think that I can just drop any model I want in there and it would work, but any idea what I would have to do to make it work?

I am relatively clueless about 3D modeling, unfortunately.

Thanks for any help.

Ok, so I have figured out that I need to name the bones the same as the animations expect them to be. However, I haven't figured out how to name or rename bones. In fact, the bones on my free models look pretty weird compared to the ones in the esenthel models. They are not really symmetrical and don't look like they connect to each other and one arm's bones are very different than the other arm. maybe I got defective models. I still need to figure out how to rename bones, though.

It's not bones you want to rename, it's SLOTS.
(bones may look different from model to model, if they work with their respective animations it's all good).

Anyway, what you want is SLOTS. In the object edit mode, go to the Slots subsection, and you should figure it out (there is a "rename") button. But more likely, you don't have slots at all. You should create some (with +1) and attach them where you want.

You can find out what slots you need by looking for them in code; see what slots your code needs and put them on your model.

For best results, attach head slot to head bone, and so on.

well the workflow atm is best with some thirdparty modeling/animation tool in my opinion, but the engine still has all necessary functions to do this in code, there is some old bone rename thread Bone Biped Rename (Tool+Sources)

there are many free modelers allowing to edit bones.. the most public free one may be http://www.blender.org

for quick and dirty rigging http://www.mixamo.com is a good solution but isn't a cheap solution for indy devs.
however in the free membership you can freely rig and animate your meshes in 2-3 mins for meshes lower than 9k verts

in my own workflow im actually using 3dcoat (modeling) -> messiah (rigging) -> iclone (animating), but im going to use maya lt to safe some time

hope that helped, best wishes

i had a problem w/ the armature looking distorted in the esenthel editor but only in dae format, though it didn't appear to affect the animations. fbx and b3d seem to import okay though. i had a problem w/ the armature in dae even when importing to blender ... collada is free software so maybe not surprising

bvh from blender also doesn't appear to import into esenthel correctly, giving a really distorted animation, though apparently this is just a script written by some random guy so again u get what u pay for maybe