Newbie help

Hello, just getting into blender and have been watching tutorial after tutorial… Figured out how I can create and sculpt a model, how to make bones, create a rig, play with weight paints, and finally animate. For my next stop I thought I’d visit the BGE and see if I can get my animations to play at a keystroke. They don’t. I’ve had problem after problem with this and most of them have quite randomly fixed themselves.

  1. BGE crashed immediately upon start. Blender just stopped working… Stopped happening after I saved it as another name…

  2. Character turned invisible. Invisibility was not turned on, no idea why this happened. Flipping the normals didn’t change anything. Deleted character and hit CTRL-Z … somehow fixed 99% of it. Now 2 of my normals/faces are invisible, no idea why.

  3. Thinking I could fix it by going to an earlier version of my project I retraced my steps and now my character is black, even with a light in its face… No clue why.

  4. Most annoying - Animations not working. I believe it is the mesh not following the rig, but it makes no sense to me…
    Although I think I made my character quite a bit too advanced for my first animations, I figure I’d somehow run into the same problem somewhere down the line, so any advice would be amazing.
    Thanks for any/all help!

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=11LIH446
Link to my blend file, please save me haha.

Blender 2.60 64bit
win7 64bit
8gb ram
HD 5670 gpu
Computer seems to handle it fine, I’m just new to blender :confused:

Also, looking on guides/tutorials on materials and UV editing? Couldn’t find much, and so my beginning characters are all suffering… Can you have multiple materials on one object? Or is that the point of UV editing?

for some reason the mediafire link isnt working, try using the built in forum attachments.

or it could just be my connection, im in the middle of a blizzard so…

Oh wow, I can tell just by the filesize you’ve made a few changes and hopefully improvements.
Yes, it is a prinny! Which is where the question of multiple materials came from. A prinny has 5 simple colors, so I wondered if I could get away with not UV mapping it. Blue body, white stomach, brown legs, orange beak, purple wings. Each one effects a general area so I wasn’t sure if it would be hard or not, but if it is individual faces that the material is affecting, I’ll have to figure it out! I wasn’t very creative, actually asked a friend what I should do, and a few years back I had introduced him to Disgaea, making him an instant fan. A prinny was the first thing he suggested so in about 12 hours, my creation was born! (10 hours of tutorials, 2 hours of playing around :p)
Next question! With your fixed up model in the game engine, how can I get it to not slide after releasing the forward button?

I will have quite a bit more fun adding animations and such to the prinny, hopefully coloring it correctly when work isn’t in the way. Unfortunately work is in the way the next few days so I only have a couple hours a night. :frowning:

Yirk, I don’t exactly know.There would be a couple of things to play with. Friction in material, damping and mass in physic panel, changing the movement type to dloc instead of servo control, adding a servo control when no key is pressed to be force the speed to come back at 0, coding it… I don’t know what of these solutions would be best, I haven’t had this problem yet, but I have tried some of them and adding another servo control to force the speed to be 0 seemed to work well for me.

Here is my result, if you are wondering what is servo control, it is explained in the first video of the tutorial series I am working on.

Newest question! I had an hour to spare (although should be sleeping) and felt like playing with it… Spent 99% of it redoing the weight paints since that got messed up, and figured out how to apply multiple materials! Prinny is now colored correctly, just need to work on the eyes (UV Mapping I suppose), but after coloring it, I wondered what it would look like rendered… Hit F12 and the prinny went poof.
Why are the cube, belt, and pouch visible, but the prinny is invisible when rendering? How can I fix that? Doesn’t appear that the camera (restrict renderability) or invisible options are clicked…

Property editor -> object panel -> duplication tab -> select none.

The duplication tab will make copies of child objects on faces/vertex… and make your mesh invisible to render.

You sir are good. Also, had already watched all of those tutorials except the ‘daily’ ones that you recommended before posting here! Like I said, watched hours of tutorials before even trying. Hopefully I’m getting somewhere in my own way though. Prinny is relatively done, just need to finish the prinny poses… randomly twirling like a ballerina in confusion, dancing in fear, and flapping arms/wings when motionless…
Current goal is to figure out how to set these up! Doing the animations is easy, making each one go to a single keystroke or always is easy… Just playing with ideas, possibly a UI with just the names of each pose where after clicking the button on screen it goes into that pose… Figuring how to rotate camera with a right click+mouse movement… Bits and pieces to explore before thinking up an actual project.