Doom3world

Fun indeed it is. At least now we know that technically it doesn't come from the script itself. Well if you feel like it, you can try ditching your Maya preferences (although the tools options are probably stored in environnement variables that will still be resident).

Or in a more drastic way, uninstall Maya, get rid of your "My Documents/maya" folder and any trace of Maya in general, restart your computer, re-install Maya, and chances are all will be right as rain. The inconvenience with this solution (beside the time it involves) is that we still won't know what caused the snafu in the first place, hence it may come back at any time *cue scary music*.

Then again it might also be a freak accident that'll never show-up again. In any case, the Terrible Truth is that I've got no idea where this comes from...

Deleting UserPrefs.mel fixed the problem. It must have become corrupted at some point. Possibly during a crash. I should have noticed something was wrong when the output window quit opening when I started Maya.

Testing out V1.9a and got this error when trying to view the archvile




Got the 1.1 d3 patch, the sdk and the latest maya6 .dll from iddevnet and the .obj is not in any of the .pk4 files...

Don't worry about the "md5toMaya.obj" not being in any of the packages officially released: it's just a temp file created by the script to store the model geometry in .obj format. It gets rewritten every time you import a new model.

As for your problem, I believe the solution is simply going back to line number 9 of the script and double-checking the path to your "Doom 3/base" directory; it looks like it's not pointing to the right place (did you forget a space, or misspelled something by any chance?)...

Yep /Doom 3/ not /Doom3/.

*re-edits line 9...*

And it works now, even used the right textures for the cacodemon!

I just installed the Maya 6 PLE and I'm trying to use your importer.

So far all I'm getting are the skeletons and an error in one of the status
lines saying cannot open whereever/md5toMaya.obj.
Originally 'whereever' said e:/personal/doom3/base but that didn't work so I started to look at your code and find these lines, so I tried hard coding a path:

But I never get a md5toMaya.obj created, anywhere.
The paths are correct for valid drivers and directories, and I've tried forward and backwards(doubled) slashes.

PS: The skeleton seems very big as was mentioned on above by someone.

PPS: Importing animations gives a progressbar and an hour glass that never goes away, even when the progressbar reaches 100%. Mabe related to the missing mesh

I'm particually interested in getting the rover imported so I can extend it's skeleton for the extra bones needed for the vehicle code.[/code]

Thought id register to say thanks for the great script - an maybe solve this guys problem( i had it too ). When i was setting the path for the doom3 base dir i noticed that it doesn't include the pak00x folders. By force of habit when extracting them i was clicking "Extract to x\" - The error in maya that i was seeing was something like "cant find file: doom3/base/md52maya.obj". In other words make sure you're using "Extract Here" instead of "Extract To". I can now load both meshes and skeletons and its working perfectly.

I found a wee issue with the script, and also solved it for you.

When the script imports an .md5mesh, it applies joint rotations as transforms. Technically, they're supposed to be joint orientations. When you reexport that model back to Doom3, it all works out the same way, so there's no harm done. The problem is that if you import just the base model in its IK pose, it's unriggable because the joints all have rotation transforms on them, and orientations aligned with the Maya world axis, when it should be vice versa. If you've tried to rig in Maya on a skeleton with rotations on the joints you know the true meaning of futility

Line 773 should change from

to


(That should be a setAttr command but that doesn't seem to properly set the joint's local/object spaces to the rotation axis, making it hard to rig the wrists, among other things - a rotate does the same thing but forces the OS/RS along with)

This imports the model with zero'd rotations and joint axes that are aligned the same way as they are in Doom3 with "r_showskel 1". Thus, you can rig the IK pose however you want to create your own animations, and they export back to Doom3 just fine.

Other than that it's the greatest thing since sliced cheese and I thank you a thousand times.

Thanks for the tip man. You're perfectly right, of course. I have to say that I didn't look into this script for several months, and I didn't open doom3 for at least as long... I wish I had more time to work on doom models, but it's just not going to happen anytime soon. Anyway I hope that all the riggers out there will take heed of your point (I'll definitely include it in the script when I go back to it)!

"The greatest thing since sliced cheese"!!! By Jove I can die a happy man!

script worked great but my mesh and skeleton are twisted.
anyone know whats wrong

seith: Wow! Thanks so much for this tool. Its been very helpfull so far. A long time ago i was planning out writing my own maya md5 importer. In about five days ill be finishing up final project here at a game school in florida. Id like to work on a md5 importer using the maya sdk, so ill probably be hitting you up for some help here soon if thats ok!

Thanks again!

-syph

syphlitix: Well, I'm glad to hear you found a use for that piece of messy code ! I have to say a plugin importer using the Maya SDK would be the best way to go, in terms of speed and precision (I myself couldn't write any C++ to save my life) .

If I may become a bit technical, right now, the biggest problem with this script (and the reason why I keep calling it "beta"), is that when the mesh is created, the vertices numbers (or "names", NOT amount) DO NOT match with the original vertices numbers stored in the md5 file. Hence the slowness when importing models, where the script has to go thru all the vertices and approximate their position/weitghing. Erm... I understand I sound very confused now; In a few words, let's just say that if two or more vertices are extremely close, the first one that the script encounters get the first weight, the second gets the second, and so on... Which might be completely wrong. It just so happens that it works out about 75% of the time, and when it doesn't, it might not be noticeable. But as you see (I hope), it's far from perfect. But it's also better than nothing!

I used the trick of converting the md5 mesh directly to OBJ format (so that the mesh be created EXACTLY the same way), and then importing it in Maya, but it didn't really take care of the problem. There could be several ways to fix this (store per-vertex blind data with weight and/or number...), but the easiest one would be to get it right from the get go, meaning the name/number of the Maya created mesh would exactly match the md5. And since I expect by now my sporadic audience to be sound asleep, I'm going to tip-toe my way out of here...

Hey seith,

Thanks so much for all the work you have put in on this mel script. Glad to see it is working for others...but it doesn't seem to work for me. Everytime I try to import a "mesh+skeleton" it loads the skeleton in about 5 sec. and then I get the following error in the script editor:

// Warning: file: C:/Program Files/Alias/Maya6.0/scripts/custom/doom3toMaya_019a.mel line 468: fopen: unable to open file "C:Program FilesDoom 3asemd5toMaya.obj" for mode "w". //
// Error: File not found.: C:Program FilesDoom 3asemd5toMaya.obj //


I am using Maya 6.0 with a new scene file. Any suggestions? Oh, where should I be selecting the .md5mesh file from...I have extracted all the folers from the pk4 package into an arbitrary work directory. Is that okay or do I need to extract the contents to a specific path file?

Thanks so much for any help

Well, you're welcome russ_c. As for your problem, I believe it should be as simple as correcting line 9 to match your doom 3 base directory. In your case, the line should probably read:



I suspect you might have inadvertently used "\" instead of "/".

As a funny side note, a few weeks ago I learned the main doom 3 animator now works in the same studio than I. Haven't found the time to go talk to him though...

Hope it helps...

Wow...

Amazing tec. support for your script seith! I feel like an idiot buggin you with such a simple problem that I should have caught. It works now, but I get the skeleton that is twice as large like other people have already posted.

Pretty slick stuff

Sevral times in the past I've had animations that were in the game but the source maya files had mysteriously dissapeard. This appears to be a great way to recover them.

Thanks!
~JRoot
Lead Animator id Software
http://www.johnroot.com

hey Seith this a great tool..if i can only get ti to work. I'm having the same problem as ktuluke had awhile ago

anyhow here is what it typed into the script editor in maya....
source "C:/Program Files/Alias/Maya6.5/scripts/doom3/doom3toMaya_018e.mel" ;
md5import ;

and bring it to the shelf, when I hit the button it gives me an error saying...
Error: Cannot find file "C:/Program Files/Alias/Maya6.5/scripts/doom3/doom3toMaya_018e.mel" for source statement.

I also went into notepad an edited the 9th line to...
global string $doomBasePath = "C:/Program Files/Doom 3/base/" ; //print ("\n$doomBasePath="+$doomBasePath);
...then saved it using the File>save command. (i'm thinking my problem lies there, but i have no idea)

oh yeah I did place the .mel file in C:/Program Files/Alias/Maya6.5/scripts/doom3/. and i'm running winxp sp2 with a Quadro GO 1400 and maya 6.5 unlimted.

Thank you for your help.

chighunter -> Mmh... Sorry, I don't see any obvious mistake there. The structure of the path you state seems to be correct (providing the directories do exist there). I know it sounds silly, but are you sure that the ".mel" file is really named "doom3toMaya_018e.mel" ?

In any case, I would suggest you use the latest version, which is this one:

[EDIT] by Seith: This is NOW the most recent version!
http://www.seithcg.com/#%5B%5BImporting%20Doom3%20models%20into%20Maya%5D%5D

Also, another (very) stupid question, but did you correctly extract the ".rar" archive containing the ".mel" file and the ".bmp" images?

The error you get in Maya basically says that there is no file of this name in the place where you say it is... Therefore, knowing that computers never lie, I would simply suggest you triple-check the name of the file (which of course changes depending on the version you have), and make sure you didn't forget a " " somewhere in the path.

That's all I can think of right now. Hope it helps...

hi seith, your importer is really good, however i found some bug with meshes poly that aren't present in the 1.8.

my problem is another thing: when i am trying to export the models it does this :




well it exports all the mesh data which are imported with your nice tool,
but it doesn't take care of mine' s add. (polySurface#).

$$_EDiT_$$
all is OK, i only forgotten the adoptions keepmesh

seith, i just wanted to thank you for the importer, its got some problems but all the good model information is in the heirarchy anyways. The tool has helped answer many of my questions.

On a similar note, has anyone gotten a custom player model to work and correctly hold weapons and such?