[HELP/ADVICE] Blender // M2Mod

[Soldan]

Hey guys, recently I've been getting into Blender, and I'm quite proud of myself so far after only a few days of trying ^_^

Now, I'm seeking a bit of help, or guidance, shall we say. To start off,  I've manged to do a few things with models recently;

I've managed to port from cata to wotlk without any problems, and now what I'm doing is modding the cata models, such as taking the Skeletal Raptor and adding the PVP Horse's armor... So yeah, no problems getting them both into blender, joining them up, UV mapping, and so on. The only problem is converting back to .m2.

From here on in the post, I'll tell you the steps I took to get this:

http://imagr.eu/up/4fdb3f00aae224_skeletal.png

1. I ported the model from Cataclysm to Wotlk via 010 Editor, and the Skeletal Raptor on it's own works perfectly ingame:


http://is.gd/h7RmHR

2. I also ported the War Horse from Cata to Wotlk without any obstacles.
3. I converted the Skeletal Raptor and the WarHorse to .m2i via M2Mod3.
4. I imported the warhorse .m2i, deleted all the unnecessary submeshes, and objects, such as the plain horse model, cameras, and armatureroot. So basically, I was left with the armor from the warhorse.
5. I saved the armor as a .blend, just incase.
6. I imported the skeletal raptor and didn't touch it (I didn't want to move it, or mess up the armatureroots, etc). I carefully worked on the armor away from the raptor model. (When I say worked on, I mean deleted some unnecessary vertices, etc). Basically I took the parts of the armor that would "look alright" with the raptor.
7. I then adjusted the pieces of armor(seperate objects) to the raptor. I had to rezise the neck+head armor, the seat, and especially the shin-guards. After it was all in place, I joined all the armor backtogether as a single submesh.
8. I UV-Wraped the model, added the material, texture set as image, and opened the png image (2 of them, 1 for the raptor base skin and the other for the armor) and as you can see in the photo, once set to "texture view", it looks quite alright.
9. Now comes the "hard?" part. The time to export it to .m2i and convert back to .m2
10. What I did, as I thought was correct (obviously not) was to add the "Par:ArmatureRoot" to the armor submesh, in other words, setting it the same as the base raptor model.
11. I thought everything was going as it should, so I selected all (A) and exported to .m2i. The model exported without any problems.
12. The file size was 126kb, which I thought was a little weird, but oh well.
13. Just to test, I imported the "just" exported .m2i to check how it was. After importing, I saw the raptor model, and the armor (still adjusted in the right places for the raptor), but as if it was "-n Z", where "n" being any number, because I don't know the number reference in Blender. But anyway, to sum it up, the armor was directly below the model.This, I thought was strange, so I thought I'd have to set the bone to the same bone as the raptor model, or set a fixed Z coordinate. I set the bone to 32, as the Raptor Model is set at. Re-exported, and the same problem.
14. I then thought, buah, why not try convert to M2 to see if it works anyway? So, I did. After re-editing the m2mod3 config, I ran the program and it crashed with this error:


http://is.gd/C23XQ2


And, this is where I got to...

I have no idea where to go from here.

If anyone has any idea whatsoever, I would really appreciate the help. If I get it working, I will release it publically

Thanks for reading,
Soldan.

[Soldan]

Bump? Anyone got any idea?

[detonatorss]

you have to edit the bones and attachments

[larrylaffer]

You forgot an important step:

You dindt assign the bones of the armor. You need to assign the armature of the skeletor to the armor mesh, and then "paint" the influence of the correct bones of the armature in the armor.

The m2i conversion is failing cuz cant find any bones assigned to the armor (and probably the mesh of the armor still has assigned the previos armature of the  war horse)