I haven't spent a lot of time "under the hood" and what I thought I knew jest ain't enough.

I'm trying to use a 574-frame dance pose on a hippo, sorta like Fantasia. The dance works fine with Jessi, so I printed out the Jessi.cr2 header and the Hippo.cr2 header. Compared the two and then used Notepad to "find & replace" so that Pelvis becomes hip, rThighHind becomes rThigh, rHoofHind becomes rFoot, etc., throughout the entire Hippo.cr2 file (and yes, I saved the original in a different location).

Well, there's the good news and the bad news! The good news is that when I load the hippo with the new definitions and the pose, the hippo dances! The bad news is that all the body parts that were renamed are now completely missing from the hippo. They are not just invisible (I looked in the material room) they are not even loaded in. "OK," says I, "Something must need to be changed in the hippo.obj file," but that file has nothing but numbers and no body part names at all. And the texture file appears to be the same for every material that is loaded in, so that's not it.

So then I loaded the original hippo as well and, since all the parts are there, I tried parenting the complete one to the partial one thinking maybe it would drag it along. Nope, that doesn't work. Tried the reverse, nope! Tried conforming, not a chance!

Don't know enough about the Group Tool to know if there is something I can do with it, esp since so many groups are missing, but I guess I could try grouping the toes, heads and tails of both figures together???

 Been at it most of the day with only partial success... 

Anybody ever successfully done something like this? Is there a link to a tut? What's the problem?

All input gratefully accepted!!

TIA,

  
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I have never even attempted it but i admire your vision lol.  The only reason I can think that the parts are missing is that because you changed the cr2 header, it is now referencing parts of the obj file that are not technically there.  I have no idea if that is right but thats what sprung to  mind

Try this:-

1. Save your Jessi dance as a multi framed pose file.
2. Perform the search and replace on the pose file (not the CR2)
3. Apply the edited pose file to the hippo.

You'll almost certainly have more work to do after that since the alignment of body parts may be different. Give it a go, tell us what occurs and we can proceed from there.

Good luck :)

"Compared the two and then used Notepad to "find & replace" so that Pelvis becomes hip, rThighHind becomes rThigh, rHoofHind becomes rFoot, etc., throughout the entire Hippo.cr2 file"

This is the very reason you failed.  You renamed the body parts in the Cr2, but not the mesh itself.  To have your new Cr2 conform to your mesh obj. you need to load you objec file into a text editor (possibly UV Mapper could do this too), and rename its body parts as well (but first save it under a different name).  The body parts on the mesh object HAVE GOT TO CORRESPOND to the body parts in the Cr2 in order that the two can work together.  If they don't, then your left with nothing but empty air in your document window.
Yours truly,
David P. Hoadley

Thanks for the replies! I guess the one thing I'm not really clear on is that If by the meshfile you are referring to the hippo.obj file, I did load that into Notepad, but there were no names listed. It was more like:

v 12345  -67890  99965 etc

vt -12345 -66666 77755 etc

So I'm not sure what I'm supposed to rename...???

PhilC:

That was my next thought, but I couldn't get WinZip to recognize/unzip the *.p2z file to get it into a text editor...?

 

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Try loading it into PhiBuilder.  You need to rename the 'Groups' that its subdivided into, ie: the joints.
DPH

As it turns out, it is simply a matter of "crossdressing."  Each of the "actors" ( aka, Body Parts) is followed by a definition of the groups making up that actor:

actor Pelvis:1

{

storageOffset 0 0 0

geomHandlerGeom 13 Pelvis

}

It was simply a matter of changing the actor name to the Jessi body part, but leaving the hippo group definition alone:

actor hip:1

{

storageOffset 0 0 0

geomHandlerGeom 13 Pelvis

}

This is why a global search & replace did not work because it changed every entry. I had to manually do the changes and then all the meshes came in & the pose file loaded properly.

The Hippo Danceth!

I'll still have to make changes to the Animation Palette, but at least all of my "actors" are now on stage.

Many thanks to noelr for the answer to this puzzle! And thanks to everyone else who responded as well. They are all good ideas and there's always more than one way to solve a problem like this!

 

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