Planetside Software Forums

Hi everybody,

I have two objects, a kayak and a motorboat in a rather large scene, lots of other objects and populations, but these two have me puzzled. You can see how they appear in the attached images. Both objects have been laundered through PoseRay. What's more, I'm not actually having any problems working with the motorboat object, adjusting its shaders, position or whatever. It just bugs me that this is happening...  :(

Advice and criticism needed.

---

I was wrong about there being no connection. If I move the kayak, the motorboat moves accordingly.

So they are two objects, and you put the boat inside the kayak... interesting. And it's on purpose, I suppose, just to have them move synchronously?

If you click on any of the + -symbols next to kayak you will see motorboat.obj show up eventually.
In the end .tgd files are XML-files and structure/reference of elements or objects is very flexible.
It's just organised text references.
You basically told TG that the motorboat.obj is organised to be inside the kayak object, but besides the discrepancy in the way that information is presented there's nothing noteworthy happening or noteworthy of doing so. If you open this project again a few years later, this will have you puzzled again :P

Quote from: Dune on January 31, 2020, 02:20:56 AMSo they are two objects, and you put the boat inside the kayak... interesting. And it's on purpose, I suppose, just to have them move synchronously?

No unfortunately "tethering" of objects this way does not work. Tethering of objects has been requested a few times in the past.
In this setup the coordinates of motorboat.obj will still decide its position.

Quote from: Asterlil on January 31, 2020, 02:10:28 AMIf I move the kayak, the motorboat moves accordingly.

This what he says....

Oh yes you're right... Interesting!
That would be great that I'm wrong.

So what happens if we place populations inside an object?

Holy cow, is this really some sort of accidental grouping? I'll have to test this immediately!

Hmm, I just tested it and imported two objects. I moved one object into the shader network of the other one. I had to reset the preview until the object inside the other one appeared in the preview again. It renders correctly, but if I move the first object, the second one stays in place. >:( 
Asterlil, is there something different in your setup?

Quote from: Hannes on January 31, 2020, 08:20:26 AMHmm, I just tested it and imported two objects. I moved one object into the shader network of the other one. I had to reset the preview until the object inside the other one appeared in the preview again. It renders correctly, but if I move the first object, the second one stays in place. >:(
Asterlil, is there something different in your setup?

That's exactly what I thought should happen and would happen.
Would still be interesting to see I'm wrong, since I share your enthusiasm for these possibilities.

Yes, the first thing I tested this morning and I couldn't get the grouping/parenting/tethering to work.

One of Terragens long requested features.

So, Asterlil, what did you do, to make the motorboat move with the kayak?

I did not do this on purpose, I assure you all! I imported the kayak, checked all the shaders as usual, then imported the motorboat, and found the situation as described above.

This morning I deleted them both, and imported the motorboat with no problems. Then I imported the kayak. Again, no anomalies. Then I imported another object, and lo! It got stuck in with the kayak's shaders. So the kayak is the problem. It has a strange shader called "None" that I have been unable to track down in Blender (in uvimages list, regular materials list,or orphan data). You can't delete materials in PoseRay. I'm going to throw the model obj out and start from scratch because that "None means there's something I haven't attached a material to in the blender file, and I can't find the guilty mesh.  >:(

Incidentally, I am having a wretched time with the net today, with timeouts, drop outs, and assorted other errors. I live in a nursing facility with a public wifi whose password hasn't been changed in 7 years. Seven years! We're probably being used to launch all those denial of service attacks I'm hearing about. :-\ So I apologize for any tardy responses.

I would guess some kind of node naming collision is occurring due to the shader(s) named "none" and it's somehow causing an odd entanglement. Surprising result though. Do both objects show up in previews and/or renders, and both move together and render in the new position once moved?

- Oshyan

The kayak is acting as some kind of parent to the next object to be imported. Obj #2 can be moved independently, but any translation of the kayak causes the child on to move with it.

And both objects show up in renders.

Could you share a stripped down tgd, we can easily replace with proxy objects,
It woulb be facinating to get to the bottom of this.

by the way if you open up the tgd file in note pad or similar and do a search for "None" you should be able to delete the offending node.

Please keep this file!!!!!!
Even if it's all accidentally, there has to be a way to extract a way to group objects. If it works in your file, why not in others?
Man, I'm really excited !!!! ;D ;D ;D

Quote from: cyphyr on January 31, 2020, 05:35:00 PMCould you share a stripped down tgd, we can easily replace with proxy objects,
It woulb be facinating to get to the bottom of this.

by the way if you open up the tgd file in note pad or similar and do a search for "None" you should be able to delete the offending node.

I agree with Cyphyr. While this may technically be an exploit, a "parent" object could be used for object grouping if we can diagnose the reason. Though does it really preview and render right? I'd imagine with naming confliction, parts may not call right. Huh

The kayak and motorboat tgo files zipped down to 13 MB each; I'm assuming that you need the objects in order to properly use the tgd file in which I placed them? The tgd itself I stripped to the bone except for a couple of surface shaders and the two boats.

But the boats themselves exceed the upload limit.  :-[ Please advise.

I fixed the problem, incidentally -- finally scrubbed the blender file clean, exported the obj, put it through PoseRay, imported it into the TG file, and imported something else after it with no accidental grouping. That was kayak5; kayak3 is the troublemaker, and is the one I zipped.

Upload it to some dropbox, if not here, possibly. Or edit in Poseray, so all heavy stuff is off that kayak, just leaving the important bits.
It seems to be working like the parenting in DAZ too, where you parent an imported object, say to a horse's head and it moves along with it. Would be cool if this can be stripped down to a working solution, just adding a zero object in Poseray or whatever and linking an imported second object to it ::)

See if this will work for you. I created a shared dropbox last night with what I hope are all the relevant files, but my pathetic public wi-fi wouldn't let me create a link until this morning.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/m4gsneex3foisiw/AAAY6lWlm5lhUeHjbbZh1ge-a?dl=0 (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/m4gsneex3foisiw/AAAY6lWlm5lhUeHjbbZh1ge-a?dl=0)

[moderator: fixed link]

Thanks, but that link doesn't seem to work. If I click directly on it, nothing happens, and copying the link and pasting it leads me to Google.

I had the same problem. I first highlighted it and then after copying and pasting into the address bar it worked.

He accidentally wrote in the URL tag for the actual URL, but the title of the URL was left as the actual link. Oops. :P

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/m4gsneex3foisiw/AAAY6lWlm5lhUeHjbbZh1ge-a?dl=0 (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/m4gsneex3foisiw/AAAY6lWlm5lhUeHjbbZh1ge-a?dl=0)

Ah cool! Thanks. Downloaded it, and will test asap!!

He? Be gentle to the very few women here :)

At my age, I wasn't going to make an issue of it. ;D We're all just entities here!

Sorry about the messed-up link. I didn't test it. The wifi was so bad earlier this morning that I was grateful to be able to post it at all.

Quote from: Asterlil on February 01, 2020, 02:17:50 PMWe're all just entities here!

Sorry about that, good note to know.

Yep, usernames do that. Gender icon is useless at my resolution. Just a gray blob. Lol Could be coloured.

Oh boy!  ;D ;D ;D

Honestly, I wasn't aware we have gender signs here. Just didn't see it. 
However, my "Man" wasn't meant for someone particular. 
Maybe a bit like "holy cow!"



...and I don't think we have religous livestock here...  ;)

"gender signs"...i didn't know it too  :)

I was just teasing a bit guys :)

;D ;D ;D 
By the way, before I went to work, I opened the file, and there were some errors about missing objs. The included objects are tgos, and I couldn't get any further, even after I replaced the missing objs by the tgos.
I didn't have more time for further testing, so any success by you, boys and girls?  ;) ;D

I look forward to hearing from you all as to whether my screwup with the models has led to something usable. :D

Same here.

Maybe you could try to upload the original objs, so that the scene loads instantly without error messages?

They are uploaded. They will expect to be in the same folder as their respective textures.  8)

Cool, thanks!

p.s. I added a few other objects for free, in the dropbox folder. All made by me, for the public domain.

Thanks again, I'll have a look asap. :)

I just tested your file. If I move the kayak, the motorboat (unfortunately) doesn't move accordingly. It stays where it is. Did you do anything different?

As I recall, I was trying to adjust the position of the kayak so that it would be resting on the  ground, and noticed that the motorboat was moving in tandem with the kayak along the Y axis. I was actually changing the numbers in the side panel, not using the manipulator directly on screen. ???

Quote from: Asterlil on February 03, 2020, 12:27:09 PMI was actually changing the numbers in the side panel, not using the manipulator directly on screen.

Nope. The motorboat stays in place unfortunately. What a pity... :(

Terrible disappointment :(