Hello!

I have written a tool based off of Assimp that converts collada/fbx models to a custom format. For some reason assimp is omitting some of the mesh's bones from the aiMesh::mBones list, but they still appear in the aiScene::mRootNode node tree. This causes my converter to mangle the bone tree structure, because some of the bone's parent bones don't appear in the aiMesh::mBones list!

Here is an example. The "RiggedModel_Final_FootNull" gets omitted from the aiMesh::mBones list but its children are not. Why does assimp do this and how would I fix it? It would be great if assimp would store all bones in the bone list.

<node name="RiggedModel_Final_FootNull" id="RiggedModel_Final_FootNull" sid="RiggedModel_Final_FootNull" type="JOINT">
<matrix sid="matrix">-0.059679 -0.519840 0.852176 6.103344 -0.147692 0.848900 0.507499 -0.000000 -0.987231 -0.095573 -0.127438 -0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000</matrix>
<extra>
<technique profile="FCOLLADA">
<visibility>1.000000</visibility>
</technique>
</extra>
<node name="RiggedModel_Final_Outtue_L" id="RiggedModel_Final_Outtue_L" sid="RiggedModel_Final_Outtue_L" type="JOINT">
<matrix sid="matrix">0.922692 0.327107 -0.204061 1.479940 -0.312313 0.944503 0.101859 0.000000 0.226055 -0.030253 0.973645 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000</matrix>
<extra>
<technique profile="FCOLLADA">
<visibility>1.000000</visibility>
</technique>
</extra>
</node>


I really appreciate any and all help!

Thanks.

Nodes are not necessarily bones.

Are you getting the bones from all the meshes in the scene (if there are more than 1)? for some reason I don't understand Assimp doesn't save the whole skeletal structure, but rather splits all the references throughout the meshes.
This means that you will have to figure out what the skeleton really is, because it does not have to be equal to the node hierarchy started with mRootNode.

Here are two links that talk about this in addition to some other animation related stuff:
http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/26382/i-cant-figure-out-how-to-animate-my-loaded-model-with-assimp
http://ephenationopengl.blogspot.se/2012/06/doing-animations-in-opengl.html

Nodes are not necessarily bones.

Yah, I kinda put 2+2 together and figured that out (some nodes are linked to bones others are not, but all nodes can have channels. So what is the difference between a boneless node and a weightless bone, you may ask? Well, I would like to know the answer to that myself xD). I just wish the assimp team could put some half-decent documentation up, it would sure save a bunch of people a lot of time.

Anyway, thanks for the help