Someone broke my neck :(biggest sad)

[gentle bridge]

the head and body of my custom ragdoll are broken.
the head rolls off the body and the neck stretches any time I load the model in.

Images and qc files coming in a future update, I didn't realize new people weren't allowed to post those

if anyone here has experience in making playermodels, pls dm me-
I'm a digital artist who's just getting into 3D modeling and I could use some help.

[random narwhal]

a. Make sure the bones are parented so that they have a tree-like dotted line between all of them.
b. If your player model is stretching, you're probably trying to apply the default player skeleton's animations to a different skeleton. The default animations will not adhere to your new skeleton. To fix this, use the proportion trick, or create new animations from scratch.

[gentle bridge]

hey thanks for getting back so soon-
are the animations just the vertex groups? I ended up turning my skeleton's resting position into an animation in new blender and followed a guide to use the proportion trick in 2.79 blender

when I get image perms I'll show everything to clear the air on this

[random narwhal]

Animations are the exported .smd files.

In blender, when exporting smd, you’re actually exporting both the mesh & the skeletal animation. Typically smd files don’t even have a mesh on them, but they can.

To export new animations, create a new Action in Blender’s Action Editor (under the Dope Sheet). I recommend switching to the Animation workspace tab up top.

When you refer to vertex groups, all they do is associate a group of vertices to a specific bone by name.

Multiple groups can affect multiple vertices, and have per-group influences on each vertex. (Why they are referred as “weight” groups)

[gentle bridge]

I've tried exporting the animation (the skeletal resting position) and using that but am still having a little trouble

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3403026334

I've posted the current version on the workshop but I'm gonna go into detail abt the problem here:

here's what my model looks like in blender. rigged and weight painted

then in gmod the ragdoll breaks at the neck.
but I can't figure out how to fix that in blender

[random narwhal]

floofy thing

Thanks for providing the workshop link. Looks like the head bone isn't parented to the final spine bone. Not the problem here.

Gonna take a closer look to confirm

that doesn't look quite right

looks like that's how it's set in-game too

my best guess is just that you have two convex hulls that are weighted to ValveBiped.Bip01_Head1

I wouldn't think that's an issue, but it's possible studiomdl just takes the 1st convex hull it sees and thinks the 2nd is a separate bone? Weird. No idea otherwise.

[random narwhal]

Also: If you have an armature modifier set on the physics model (or if you have the physics model parented to the armature), remove the modifier or deparent it. That should hopefully fix this issue. At least, that worked for me last time I encountered this.

[random narwhal]

Confirming, I can see the triangle mesh connected on a dead NPC, while the head block remains disjointed.

[random narwhal]

The technical explanation is when a ragdoll is created, it loops through all bones in the model and assigns convexes from the .phys file. It might only do one convex per bone, unless the model as marked as $concave

[random narwhal]

I can't tell what that triangle goes to though, since I don't see it in this screenshot

Also, your player model is going to have a gaping hole people can shoot through their neck, lol.

[random narwhal]

in the mean time I'm gonna see if I can improve the physics a tad.

It's ok for the hulls to touch. You'd really just need to watch out for cross-tree collision, like between the legs or if you have too many midsections. Limbs are no-collided with their connected neighbors.

[random narwhal]

....Okay, so maybe that's no longer the case. Oh well.

Exporting without any armature set only just clears all vertex groups and sets them to root now. Dumb plugin.

The more manual workaround would be to just rotate the bones using a duplicate of the skeleton. Not ideal, but eh.
Or create a new physics mesh from the imported smd skeleton. That also works too, apparently.
(technical: blender and source use two different bone axis definitions. it's why importing SMDs have bones lying on their sides.)

Feel free to use it if you wish, or don't. (File> 📎 Append > Objects folder)

[random narwhal]

Oh, nice. I can just drop in the .phy file from a compiled dummy.

Should work for you then I think. Not sure if the jigglebone was being worked on.

[random narwhal]

$detailblendmode 5 is pretty cool imo

You do have to underbrighten the texture file for it to work well, but it's nice

Catbox because peacekeeper forbids zip files for some reason.
https://files.catbox.moe/8ebd7z.zip

[gentle bridge]

wow thank you for the help, finally gonna have time to work on this again this weekend but this has been eyeopening for me, fr

thank you for sending those files too-
hoping this will all be easier next time

[lone anchor]

blendmode 5 makes detail texture glow on top of base, weird decision for character

[random narwhal]

Much better than the selfillum they shipped with. I think it’s a VRchat thing to just enable your character to be illuminated in all environments regardless of realism

What $halflambert/$albedoboost is meant to do in HL2/TF2 but fails to accommodate here as even those options are not toon enough.

Seems like something you’d tune the light warp texture for but I didn’t want to check/edit that

[eager fern]

But why are the edges sharp?

Is this how it's intended?