Vertex animation plays fine in HLMV, broken in SFM

[Jill]

Hi, I'm trying to export a baked cloth simulation to a vertex animation for use in SFM.

So far I've:
Setup and baked the cloth sim
Exported it to an MDD
Applied the mesh cache modifier, pointing to the exported MDD
Added the vertex animation to the BleST export settings
Enabled "Generate sequence"
Pasted the BleST-generated QC segment into the QC file
Compiled

In HLMV, the animation appears perfectly fine. But when viewed in SFM's model browser or imported as a sequence on the model, the animation plays very slowly and only plays a short segment from near the end of the animation.

Is this a problem with SFM (which should support vertex animation, with it even working fine in SFM's HLMV) or am I doing something wrong that could cause this?

EDIT:

Originally posted by Jill:

Late update on this, I figured this out a few hours ago.

I just stopped bothering with trying to use BleST's premade sequences and disabled the sequence feature. SFM then gives you direct access to the sliders to control the animation and that works just fine.

Thanks to everyone who tried to help regardless, what a weird issue.

[xdshot]

Something wrong with qc i guess

[Pte Jack]

Does the FPS rate you created the animation at in Blender = The FPS rate you set in your QC for the sequence and is it the same as the FPS rate for your clip?

Blender Default is 24FPS (unless you change it), $sequence "yada" "Yada.smd" FPS <Rate> (should be the same), SFM's default frame rate is also 24 FPS (unless you change it when you create a session).

[Jill]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

Does the FPS rate you created the animation at in Blender = The FPS rate you set in your QC for the sequence and is it the same as the FPS rate for your clip?

Yes. 60 in Blender, 60 in the QC, 60 in SFM

[Pte Jack]

Originally posted by Jill:

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

Does the FPS rate you created the animation at in Blender = The FPS rate you set in your QC for the sequence and is it the same as the FPS rate for your clip?

Yes. 60 in Blender, 60 in the QC, 60 in SFM

Sheesh, didn't even get a chance to finish!! LOL Sorry don't know then!

[Jill]

Well, here's a link to the source files + blends if anyone else wants to take a stab at this. Be warned though that it's not pretty.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CpuJdA0oLClC-mGGCdNC72eG9PsSsC-z/view?usp=sharing

[Pte Jack]

Just in the off chance you haven't seen this, it may help.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU9eMf5kKtg

[Jill]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

Just in the off chance you haven't seen this, it may help.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU9eMf5kKtg

This is pretty much what I did, with the exception of the fact that BleST wouldn't export the animation just from baking. I had to export the baked animation as an MDD and then reapply it to the mesh using the Mesh Cache modifier to get BleST to actually export it.

[Pte Jack]

Were you using the Eevee render engine or the Cycles engine? Eevee doesn't do some things that the Cycles engine does do... I know baking textures is one of them, but it may extend to baking period. You might want to switch engines, see if options change and try again.

[Jill]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

Were you using the Eevee render engine or the Cycles engine? Eevee doesn't do some things that the Cycles engine does do... I know baking textures is one of them, but it may extend to baking period. You might want to switch engines, see if options change and try again.

Seems odd that the render engine would change underlying functionality like that but stranger things have happened I suppose. I'll give it a shot next time I'm poking this.

[Jill]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

Were you using the Eevee render engine or the Cycles engine? Eevee doesn't do some things that the Cycles engine does do... I know baking textures is one of them, but it may extend to baking period. You might want to switch engines, see if options change and try again.

As I expected switching to cycles did nothing.

I did manage to fix the issue with BleST not exporting baked animation, it seems when I tried previously it wasn't exporting properly because the default starting frame is 0, and apparently if one of the frames you have set isn't within range of the actual frames of the project BleST gets confused.

This doesn't bring me any closer to figuring out why the animation refuses to play properly in SFM though.

[Pte Jack]

Well, Sorry Jill, I was only guessing and thought switching might give further options while baking or might fix the animation in SFM. Have you tried rolling back to 2.79b and BleST 2.10.2 to see if it works coming out of that mix? Other than that, I have nothing else to offer. But if it does work without modification coming out of the older mix, then there might be something wrong in the coding coming out of the new.

[xdshot]

Models should usually be bound to armature bone

[xdshot]

Might only suggest to see how I did similar thing
https://mega nz/file/fQhDyAoS#EAehi7FBFAqTCMOXiZ7gLzU2EO3wIb1xKV2AEyn0PM4
Created all frames, edited controller, specified bone for flex driving
Though I must say, there's something with SFM as I have similar oddity when importing sequence...

[xdshot]

You might want to just control bone itself as it specifies flexes states in range 0..1

[xdshot]

Or just get rid of $boneflexdrivers and control BigReveal and multi_BigReveal flexes. First one "enables" animation, second specifies frame. Set BigReveal to 1 and Make linear interpolation for multi_BigReveal from 0 to 1 to playback animation.