Hello, I am new to this forum and this community. I've just recently started working with OGRE Mesh and so far I've had around a hundred mental breakdowns ( hehe ).

This is my most recent one.

I'm trying to import a .mesh and a .skeleton combination for a ped into the World Builder. I've rigged an armature in Blender, applied weights and limit totals. It animates properly in OGRE Meshy.

However,
When I try to import the files (by dragging the .mesh file) into the World Builder, everything just greys out and stays like that until i exit the application.
No errors. I had errors before when I had too many bones affecting the same vertex and I fixed that. Now, I got nothing. It just greys out everything when its trying to import the skeleton asset.

It also creates an "_import_" folder in the project directory, which contains the skeleton. When I exit the application, the folder disappears.

Any help would be appreciated.

P.S, not everything has been a setback. I've successfully made a vehicle to work in game. Which makes me think this is a workflow error on my part, more than anything. The exporter from Blender does seem to work properly.

I've attached the actual .mesh, .skeleton and .scene in the zip file to this reply.

The export settings are as follow:

I can't help to think I'm overcomplicating things.
All I want is my ped model to replace the police_man from the game. I've worked with modifications in other games using peds before, and the skeleton is usually not animated in those games. The skeleton is usually in a T-pose and the game then loads animations to the skeleton. Naming the different bones is usually critical. But for Emergency 5 I've found no naming rules when it comes to bones. Infact, there's basically nothing at all on the internet covering this topic. And I've searched a lot..

EDIT
I wouldn't mind starting from scratch to make sure I got the workflow right. If any of you reading this topic knows how to replace a pedestrian with one you made yourself, please let me know :)

I unfortunately can't access the official skeleton, atleast I don't think that I can.
I've found no way to get a .skeleton file into blender 2.92. I also tried Autodesk 3DS Max, downloaded the trial for 2022 (considering to buy the subscription purchase based on if I suceed with this or not). The Easy Ogre Exporter does not seem to work properly for 2022.

I must say thank you for your patience and dedication to help me. It's highly appreciated.

I remade the bone structure from scratch, using your images as reference for parenting and naming.
However, the results are still the same unfortunately. Which leads me to think it's either an export error on my end, or an actual xml conversion error. Maybe I've setup OGRE wrong. I don't know.

I'll attach the latest files to this post. Maybe you could run the xml through your converters and see if you find any errors? I've also included the auto generated XML converter log in the .rar file.

When I run the mesh through the mesh upgrader tool from OGRE (just to eliminate the chance of having an outdated mesh, this did nothing however and is probably unrelated) i got the following log



and my new bone structure

I have made some progress, finally! Using a different XML Converter I was able to export a .mesh and .skeleton from Blender and have it show up in game.
When I use my skeleton (which only has an idle pose animation inside of it, sort of casually moving their arms and legs as if they were idling) or the original game police man skeleton, I get this floating effect where the mesh floats and waves back and forth in a solid T-pose position when used on the policeman unit prefab.
The game does recognize the bones it seems, because for example if I use the pistol or the handcuffs with the model I made, the pistol kinda floats in the air where it's supposed to. It's just not followed by the mesh. If that makes sense. Which again, does not make sense, because the vertices are linked with the bones with a weight limit of 4, in Blender.

Can you describe the workflow after you've exported your model with a biped skeleton? How do you actually go about and make it a player unit in game after that point? I'm pretty familliar with the World Editor by now so you could just summarize it real quick for me. No need to be deep in the details.

I've attached the latest successful files to the reply. For now, I copied the exact names of the bones with capital letters. The game does seeem to approve. It made no difference to the situation described above with or without capital letters.

That worked like a charm! However, the animation looks completely out of place with mesh going all over the place. But hey, it's animated atleast hehe
It's probably related to the bone structure (hierarchy, id and placement) which doesnt translate very well over to the default police man skeleton. I'll follow the default skeleton structure more closely (with position, rotation and bone ids) and see if I can match the game skeleton somehow.

Couple of days late, but I just wanted to say I've now successfully (with your help) made a replacement ped for the policeman. Thank you very much! It animates properly now when I paid greater attention to the hierarchy and location of the bones. I basically had to make a new armature from scratch and "guess" the location, rotation and scale based on the xml.