Problem. Bone locations/anims good in blender, bad in steam

[Misfire!]

I have a vehicle model in blender with a few simple animations. Wheel spin, wheel turning.... Locations and animations work as expected in blender. However once the model is exported and compiled, the bones and their associated meshes are out of place. The animations seem to work for the most part, but the model looks more like an exploded view. Front wheels for example are not close to the main body. The stand out like distant extensions. I suspect some of the issue may be related with my weak understanding of qc writing. But at least all my parts are there and responding to animation movements. dropbox link to a hlmv picture... if the forum allows it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/j668fvyqupvak4q/Vehicle1.jpg?dl=0

The old front wheel rotate as expected, just way out of place. And sorry, all textures not done yet.... pending model repair

[EmperorFaiz.wav]

In Blender, make sure all the objects' origin points (orange dot when you select the object) are at the origin position. In Object Mode, Shift+S and select "cursor to center". Then, select all the objects, press Shift+Ctrl+Alt+C and select "Origin to 3D cursor".

After that while all the objects selected, Ctrl+A and apply "rotation and scale".

[Misfire!]

Thanks for the reply. I've worked out one issue. some of my parented bones are linked but not connected. (dotted lined). Once I connected the bones, the odd placements at idle position were corrected. Also if I exclude animations, all meshes are in the correct locations at Idle. However if I include animation smd's the mesh placements go out of wack again. I've repeated setting origins to center and reapplied location/rotation, but no improvement.

Now that I'm re-reading your post I see you say to do rotation and scale instead, so that may be my mistake. I'll recheck all my mesh work again including applying scale and see where I'm at.

[Misfire!]

After restarting from scratch on bone placements and animations I'm pretty much at the same place. All is well in blender, but a complete mess in HLMV. Origins of my mesh and rig are both at center, all trans forms applied. Any other ideas what I could be getting confused on?

[Marco Skoll]

Other possibilities:

1) Check that the idle animation you're exporting is completely cleared, with no active posing.
2) Check that you're exporting with the correct armature modifier (you cannot export correctly with more than one armature modifier)
3) If you're using DMX format, make sure that no meshes have the same name as any bones.
4) And if you're exporting in SMD format, bear in mind that Source only supports three weight links per vertex, but in SMD format it automatically culls the links without telling you, often messing up deformations.

(And while it's probably not going to be the problem this time, it also bears mentioning that Source also culls weight links of less than 5% unless you're using a specially cracked compiler, which caused me a heap of trouble once...).