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if it was that easy I will not asked for help at the first place. I'm an artist, I can draw things and even try to examine formats but it's hard for me to dig into engineer stuff
however thanks for your help shak

Tosyk wrote:if it was that easy

I didn't mean it to be easy - what I meant is (if noone cares) that it would be a good idea to start with searching for all those infos you (or I) can get easily.

I'm an artist, I can draw things and even try to examine formats but it's hard for me to dig into engineer stuff
however thanks for your help shak

As you may know (or not) it's my intention to give people who can't code means/tools
to help themselves. (Sooner or later I hope to provide a solution for skeletons and skinning data.)

For your example machine_gunner_male_eng_outfit it's indeed a little bit confusing:
from the bone list at the beginning of the file skin.ply it looks as if it had 24 bones.

So the following list makes sense (assumed we've one weight for two bones), maximum ID: 0x18=24
weight .. 4 boneIDs
1.000000 18000000
1.000000 18000000
1.000000 18000000
1.000000 0C000000
1.000000 0C000000
1.000000 0C000000
0.600000 0C0D0000
0.500000 0C0D0000
0.710000 0D0C0000
0.710000 0D0C0000
1.000000 0D000000
1.000000 0D000000
1.000000 0D000000
1.000000 0D000000
1.000000 0D000000
1.000000 0D000000
1.000000 0D000000
1.000000 0D000000
1.000000 0D000000
0.710000 0D0C0000
1.000000 0D000000
0.710000 0D0C0000
0.710000 0D0C0000
1.000000 0D000000
1.000000 0D000000
1.000000 0D000000
1.000000 0E000000
[...]
0.727961 0B0A0000
0.647153 0B0A0000
1.000000 09000000
0.574509 09180000
0.530880 09180000
0.679686 09180000
0.938692 09180000
0.952961 09180000
0.914358 09180000
0.746017 09180000
0.530865 09180000
0.680168 05010000
0.558641 05010000
[...]
1.000000 09000000
1.000000 09000000
1.000000 09000000
1.000000 09000000
1.000000 09000000
1.000000 09000000
1.000000 09000000
1.000000 09000000
1.000000 09000000
1.000000 09000000
1.000000 07000000
1.000000 07000000
1.000000 07000000
1.000000 07000000
1.000000 07000000
1.000000 07000000
1.000000 07000000
1.000000 07000000
1.000000 07000000
1.000000 07000000
1.000000 07000000
1.000000 07000000

Problem is that there's 36 bones (created by the script from Mr. Paz) in the following picture and even 42 "bones" in eng-mgun.mdl.

So this is not a suiting sample for learning the basics.

I could think of building a simplified skeleton using the matrices from the mdl file and these bones: but it's a tedious task.

well, funny things to come:
I built a reduced skeleton manually and it looked a little bit weird.
I thought I might have misunderstood the sense/order of the ik_ bones and googled for it.

Bang, found this:
http://www.moddb.com/tutorials/export-h ... max-to-mow
http://www.moddb.com/groups/gem-2-edito ... ls-in-game

the latter containing gb_com.max, a 3dsmax2009 project file. Skinning works for the hands only, strangely.

If you compare the select from scene window in that project with the picture it seems I wasn't too wrong, misordered the head only
(having 24 bones only, of course). (I should have compared to the skeleton hierarchy from Mr. Paz in my previous post. )

Next step is to reduce the skeleton of the project (see right side of pic) to 24 bones to see whether it works better than mine (guess the matrices I used need some reversing).

so could it be some kind of a multiplier in mr. paz script which is multiplies similar named bones, like palm or foot and gives them an index?

nice finding btw — you decided to go on the reverse and looked into the exporter

3D Object Converter 6.50 open all .ply model files

medwed wrote:3D Object Converter 6.50 open all .ply model files

does it hadle the bones as well?

Tosyk wrote:

medwed wrote:3D Object Converter 6.50 open all .ply model files

does it hadle the bones as well?

No