How to properly extract full bone rigging info into Blender or Max...

dvochin_980fde5d8e

Hi all,

I’m having trouble extracting full bone rigging information from a Victoria 4.2 character into any modeling tools like Blender, Max or Unity.
To explain, if I were to export a Collada DAZ character in Blender and then attempt to rotate a bone like “Pinky3” or “Thumb2” along either X,Y or Z in either global or local rotation, the finger appears to bend in an unnatural way because the full rotation information was not correctly imported. (Max and Unity imports through Collada or FBX yield the same thing)

Looking into this over many hours, while Blender Collada importer does a fairly good job at extracting each bone head & tail and thereby calculate a default rotation (from ‘tail – head’ vector’), the “Roll” part of the bone information is always zero which explains why the fingers don’t bend naturally like they do inside DAZ… Only large bones like elbows, thighs, shin or feet appear reasonable as they were naturally aligned with either x,y or z anyways.

Is there a way to extract the full bone rigging information so I can obtain the missing ‘roll’ data from each bone?

Thanks for any help you can offer… have been stumped at this for a long time!!

Dan

SickleYield

As far as I know you're further than anyone's gotten to this point. Cr2 rigging has never properly exported since it is proprietary to Poser (and emulated by DAZ Studio, basically).

dvochin_980fde5d8e

Hi SickleYield, thanks for taking the time!

There's got to be a way to extract full bone rotation (and hopefully rotation limits) in some way... (even if that means extracting it manually bone by bone from DAZ or Poser) Given how widely used Vic42 is used everywhere, surely someone must have a fully-exported bone rig in Blender or Max somewhere??

Am I to read from your post that I should focus on extracting this data from Poser instead of DAZ?

Thanks again!

SickleYield

dvochin said:

Hi SickleYield, thanks for taking the time!

There's got to be a way to extract full bone rotation (and hopefully rotation limits) in some way... (even if that means extracting it manually bone by bone from DAZ or Poser) Given how widely used Vic42 is used everywhere, surely someone must have a fully-exported bone rig in Blender or Max somewhere??

Am I to read from your post that I should focus on extracting this data from Poser instead of DAZ?

Thanks again!

Honestly I have no idea. Like I said, no one's really done it. There was a script a while back that claimed it could import .cr2s with intact rigging into Blender, but it never worked as advertised on V4 or M4. That was this site: http://blender3dclub.com/?page_id=616

More recently there's this, which I haven't tried: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.4/Py/Scripts/Animation/Cr2bone_import

dvochin_980fde5d8e

Hi SickleYield, thanks again for those links... that Cr2bone_import looks particularly interesting and will see if I can get it to run, and if it gets me the rotation data I need.

Studying this further, if this helps other the data can be manually extracted by selecting the 'Joint Editor Tool' (Alt+Shift+J) and then reading the rotation value for any bone you select in the 'Tool Setting' pane.

Now to try to find a way to extract this rotation data for all bones programmatically... Maybe that cr2 importer can do it, will let you guys know what I find out...

:)

dvochin_980fde5d8e

For those following this, the tool at http://www.blender3dclub.com/posertools/CharacterImporter.php was able to do exactly what I needed!! :)