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Rubric Wrangler
Original Poster
#1 Old 29th Jun 2012 at 5:46 PM Last edited by PharaohHound : 16th Apr 2016 at 5:52 PM.
Default Tutorial: Using Blender to Make Bonedeltas for Pet Sliders
This tutorial is meant to be used in conjunction with CmarNYC's Creating a Pet Body Shape Slider tutorial. It is intended for people with little to no experience in Blender, and will walk you through the steps for making bonedeltas for sliders.

You will need
Blender version 2.63. Pick the appropriate version for your operating system.
A's Blender Rigs for pets You don't actually need the plugins, just the download the .blend files, unzip them, and put them somewhere you can find them

Load your file
Follow CmarNYC's tutorial, up to exporting the bonedeltas. In this tutorial I'll be using a dog instead of a cat, but you can follow along with a cat or horse. Open Blender. Then, open up the appropriate .blend file for the species and age your slider is for

The first two letters of the filename indicate the age and species of the file:

a_ - adult/elder
c_ - child

_h - horse
_c - cat
_d - dog
_l - little dog

Find the file with the right combination of letters, and open it. In my case, that's "ad". There is only one puppy file, because small and large puppies both use the same model.

Basic Blender controls
Select = Right click
Rotate view = Hold and drag Middle Mouse
Move view = Shift + Hold and drag middle mouse
Zoom in/out = Scroll wheel

Preparing your Blender UI
Your UI will probably look something like this:

To create more workable space, drag the border of the left panel all the way to the left side of the screen (by left clicking on it and dragging), and drag the bottom panels down. There are two separate sidebars on the right. Drag the border between them to the right side of the screen to minimize it.
You should be left with something like this:


Select a joint on the animal by right clicking on it. Any joint will do right now.

In the remaining right sidebar, press the little arrows next to Transform and Item to expand those panels. If you like, left click and hold on the shaded upper right corner of the Item panel, and drag it up so it's directly below the Transform panel.

In the Item panel, you will be able to see the name of the joint you have selected in the second line (the one with the little bone next to it).

Adjusting the joints
Select the first joint you want to work on. It should turn light blue. If it doesn't, try right clicking again. Some "joints" on the animal rig actually have two separate joints in the same place, by right clicking repeatedly you should be able to alternate between them.

I am going to make a simple slider that changes the tail thickness. Select the b_Tail0 joint (it's located near the base of the tail).

Now take note of the Transform panel. There are three ways to Transform (change) the joint. We can change its Location, Rotation and Scale. For this tutorial, we will be dealing with Scale only.

There are three directions we can affect the scale of this joint. These directions are known as X, Y, and Z. Collectively they are known as the "axes", which are different than the things you chop wood with (singular "axis"). Try pressing the arrows next to each axis in turn. You should see that X controls the length of the tail, Y controls the up-down thickness, and Z (you may need to rotate your view to look down on the dog to see this) changes the side-to-side thickness. Which axes control which directions might change depending on the joint.

Since I want to change the tail thickness, but not its length, I need to adjust the Y and Z axes. We will start by doing the "right" direction of the slider (the way it looks when you slide the slider all the way to the right), which should make the tail larger. Scale the tail however pleases you, as long as it's larger than the original. 1.000 is the normal thickness, anything above this (e.g. 1.300) is bigger than normal.

Once you're happy with how the tail looks, open Delphy's Bonedelta Editor, but keep Blender open too.

Making the bonedeltas
Open up the Bonedelta Editor (make sure to prepare it by adding the extra bones as detailed in Cmar's tutorial). Select Open from the menu, then find the folder where you exported your bonedeltas files to from the slider package. Open the bonedelta that is for adult dogs, and in the right slider direction.

It will come preloaded with one joint, Head0. Select it, then scroll waaaay down the list of bones to the new animal bones, and find Tail0 (they are organized alphabetically) and select it. This should change the joint in the left sidebar to read Tail0.

As you can see, the Bonedelta Editor has fields to control the joints, just like Blender does (Offset in the Bonedelta Editor is equivilant to Blender's Location field).

Tab back to Blender and look at your Transform panel (make sure you have the Tail0 joint selected). We are going to take the numerical values from Blender's Scale field and input them to the Bonedelta Editor, but since they interpret the numbers a little differently, we will need to adapt them. It may be helpful to open up a blank document in Notepad to keep track of the numbers. Here are the changes we need to make

If the number in Blender begins with a 1, change the leading 1 to a 0.
A few examples:
1.250 becomes 0.250
1.500 becomes 0.500
1.673 becomes 0.673

If the number in Blender begins with 2 or a larger number, subtract 1 from the leading number.
For example:
2.400 becomes 1.400
5.390 becomes 4.390

If the number in Blender is under 0, things are a little more complicated. We need to subtract the number from 1.0, then make the result negative. Google is your friend with these more complex conversions!
For example, say the number in Blender is 0.7: 1.0 minus 0.7 = 0.3, which becomes -0.3.

A few more examples:
0.900: 1.0 - 0.9 = 0.1, which becomes -0.1
0.86: 1.0 - 0.86 = 0.14, which becomes -0.14
0.982: 1.0 - 0.982 = 0.018, which becomes -0.018

These conversions only need to be done to the Scale fields, and the W axis of the Rotation field. For Location, and X, Y, Z of Rotation, paste the numbers directly into the Bonedelta Editor.

Once you've done your conversions, paste the new numbers into the Bonedelta Editor and save. Make sure to input the numbers for the correct axes; if you put your values for Y in the X slot, you'll make the tail longer instead of thicker!

Closing remarks
You have now built a new bonedelta that you can use in your slider package. Repeat the process for all of the bonedeltas you need, changing the look of the adjustment for each direction and age. Bonedeltas for the left direction should make things smaller instead of larger, so you will need to change your Blender model to make the tail smaller, then convert and import those numbers to the left bonedelta. Carry on making your slider following Cmar's tutorial!

Lessons learned
In the process of doing this tutorial, and testing the resulting slider ingame, I realized that for some reason the tail bones don't transform neatly along Y and X axes. Even if I don't make the tail longer in Blender, it ends up being longer ingame. Very frustrating! I've had to "counter balance" this issue by doing small corrections along the X axis to keep the tail from getting longer. This is why we always test ingame.

The meadows are in bloom:
who has ever seen such insolence?

simblr
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˙uʍop ǝpᴉsdn ǝɹ,noʎ 'oN
#2 Old 29th Jun 2012 at 6:28 PM
Sweet

"Part of being a mesher is being persistent through your own confusedness" - HystericalParoxysm
| (• ◡•)| (❍ᴥ❍ʋ) [◕ ‿ ◕]
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#3 Old 29th Jun 2012 at 9:16 PM
Very sweet! And useful for making bonedeltas for human sims as well as pets.
Lab Assistant
#4 Old 30th Jun 2012 at 2:20 PM
Thank you for this wonderful tutorial
Test Subject
#5 Old 13th Apr 2016 at 8:10 AM
great tutorial <3 1000 Thanks for this!
But I have a question..

when I have a value in the scale from 5,2000 in Blender,
how can I expect here?

I hope you understand my bad english :/
Rubric Wrangler
Original Poster
#6 Old 13th Apr 2016 at 4:48 PM
Hi @Zenobia ! Can you post a screencap of your transform panel in Blender? It's been a while since I made sliders, but 5.2000 sounds like a very unusual number to have there.

The meadows are in bloom:
who has ever seen such insolence?

simblr
Test Subject
#7 Old 13th Apr 2016 at 8:04 PM
Quote: Originally posted by PharaohHound
Hi @Zenobia ! Can you post a screencap of your transform panel in Blender? It's been a while since I made sliders, but 5.2000 sounds like a very unusual number to have there.


thank you very much for your answer <3
ok, here is it
Screenshots
Rubric Wrangler
Original Poster
#8 Old 14th Apr 2016 at 1:22 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Zenobia
thank you very much for your answer <3
ok, here is it


Thanks for the screencap! I have not been able to test in-game because my laptop's TS3 install somehow got infected with 1.69 so I have to reinstall everything, but I would recommend trying 4.3000 as the value. Can't say what will happen, but it seems like a logical place to start, and I managed to build the package without the bonedelta editor or S3PE complaining (for whatever it's worth). If I get a chance I'll try out my test package on my main computer, but if I can't do that let me know how it goes for you!

The meadows are in bloom:
who has ever seen such insolence?

simblr
Test Subject
#9 Old 15th Apr 2016 at 2:12 PM
aww..thank you very much <3 I have try this and this looks correct in game <3 now I have understand that
Rubric Wrangler
Original Poster
#10 Old 16th Apr 2016 at 5:49 PM
Yay! Glad it worked for you! I will amend the tutorial to include this information. Thanks for letting me know!

The meadows are in bloom:
who has ever seen such insolence?

simblr
Test Subject
#11 Old 26th Jun 2022 at 8:45 AM
A's Blender Rigs for pets - link don't work anymore
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