How do you assign vertices to a bone in Softimage?

Also I can’t seem to export to SMD every time I do the resulting SMD is blank, it has nothing in it.

Look in the tutorial PDF that comes with XSI in the bone rigging tutorial. Basically you want to add a deformation to your skeleton. XSI does it fairly quickly in auto mode then you just need to tweak the envelope weights depending if you exporting for HL1 or HL2. Its pretty much covered in the tutorial.

As for the exporter - from my experimenting what you need to do is have your bone rig and your mesh collapsed to a single and use multi textures to get it to export. I still cant get it to work 100% to be honest and I've rather given up with XSI and gone back to Max instead.

That sucks, what about exporting to another format? All the options are grayed out. Do in need to download plugins to get them to work. Then from there I could open it in MS3D and convert to SMD.

Well dont forget that the SMD exporter for XSI is specifically for HL2 and although the SMD format is the same, the project "flow" for making meshes that can be exported is different. I have never got it to export a mesh as an reference SMD, just an animation and even then it tried to export the mesh as a bone node.

I also noticed that when I did get some limited mesh export that it doesnt actually attatch a vertex to a bone. I think thats what the VTA format is for, so if your going to use XSI for HL1 i don't think its writes SMD's correctly.

Also don't for get that HL2 XSI is just the EXP "trial" version of XSI which has a lot of stuff removed. For example the scripting part has the file system object taken out so you cant write import/exporters in VBScript either.

That said, even the full version of XSI comes with almost zero file format plugins and softimage only seem to develop plugins for getting other formats into XSI, not the other way around.

Frankly, I've tried with XSI but given up and gone back to Max.

Grain,

I looked a bit more at how XSI exports SMD's and after a quick rig experiment it is apparent that for reference SMD's at least the SMD formats are NOT the same.

For example, here is a traingle definition from a HL1 SMD:


red_beret.bmp
19 -0.1485 0.2948 68.7152 0.1413 -0.2757 -0.9508 0.2493 -0.0002
19 1.1609 0.2864 68.8297 0.0628 -0.3031 -0.9509 0.3420 0.0004
19 0.1235 -7.4628 71.1759 0.1856 -0.2942 -0.9376 0.2686 0.5246

And for HL2


Char_UV_Texture.gif
0 -0.632970 18.279375 0.019237 -0.912688 -0.241517 0.329652 0.723633 0.232910 2 10 0.416221 11 0.583779
0 -0.801512 18.868038 -0.214360 -0.669886 -0.382292 -0.636479 0.650391 0.280762 2 10 0.166638 11 0.833362
0 -0.654258 18.281086 -0.133978 -0.968897 -0.184305 0.165138 0.689453 0.236816 2 10 0.401742 11 0.598258


As you can see theres a lot more data there which I assume is vertex weighting and the SMD doesnt import into MS3D correctly.