Exporter specific topics

#1 Are you referring to the AutoRig HellDog tutorial video?

If so, I found there to be some issues with exporting that system. By nature, that setup is using a combination of like 2 or 3 separate rigs for all the components to the character. Now, don't get me wrong, I found the generic rig it produced to be of acceptable quality without going to the work of building extra-ordinary controls. It produced a somewhat odd rig in the dts file, all the nodes animated or configured to be exported, and they followed the animations embedded within the shape with export. It was the fact that the nodes were all parented to the Scene Root and not in a hierarchical chain that I found unacceptable. It did follow the animations, as the nodes all had transform and rotation data, but that would not work if you, say grabbed a node inside the engine procedurally and gave it some rotation data....the seemingly 'children' nodes would not follow, as their parent is the Scene Root and not the 'obvious' parent in a bipedal figure.

Now...if you construct your rigs in a chain by hand, bone by bone, and use the tools available to give symmetry to the nodes and then setup all the IK controls by hand; I am fairly certain this would export as a chain with branches, as any imported 'chain' I tested worked fine, meaning it exported as a 'skeleton' fully connected.

The LOD's need to be 'manually' setup in the dialog, no 'namingConvention' is needed to append to the mesh nodes in the Scene. There is auto details, so this is where you set them as well as any LOD's made by 'hand'...you'd select that node and do the details.

I hope this answers your questions to some degree...perhaps this Digital Tutors video[s] will fill in the really 'in depth' details on the potential of HD and Torque. I see quite a lot of potential in HD as a content creator. The scripting ability alone is a powerful example showing the absolute control you can achieve over your art.

#2 So you're saying that if I used the biped skeleton, any animations I made using the biped skeleton would work fine in the game. However if I tried to do something like rag doll effects it might not work because the nodes are not set up correctly to be adjusted on the fly?

The LoD part was a bit fuzzy do you have a link to anywhere that discusses LoD setup in Houdini for exporting? That slide bar is very deceptive then, it would seem if you had everything defined in the mesh then you wouldn't need a bar asking about LoD, to me a slide bar would only mean automatic procedural creation of LoD.

#3 Another question, do all objects exported have to have a bone in them? I can't get a non bone model to export. This doesn't seem like a nice feature since then even a crate would need a bone in it. And how will that end up working for exporting something to DTS to import to constructor to then export as a dif?

#4 Well, I don't know of any DTS shapes in the SDK that are 'nodeless'[is there any, I looked pretty well], and I guess it's a good DTS format question....may I ask why you need a shape without any nodes?

Most meshes[subMeshes] that are not 'skinned' objects, 'usually' when exported, produce a node to 'hang' the mesh object on...think I'm right there. So, this happens by 'default' often, and trying to cull these nodes, usually results in them[verts] being tossed onto the Root node of the Scene, and will not allow you to collapse/cull that[Root] node as well.....hmm...still can't see a reason yet for a 'nodeless' DTS shape, unless the only reason is to satisfy a Constructor 'convention'......I am not sure. I have purposefully stayed away from the whole Diff 'world' of issues...and pitfalls.

This may be a better 'Constructor' area question....or a general Modeling question, I'm not sure any exporter will do this??