Would you mind rebooting Source FilmMaker, looking at the model in the model browser, and then copy-pasting the exact errors from the console to here?

It would probably be a good idea to load the model in the game you compiled it for and then checking the console, as that will tell you the name of the material it's trying to find but can't find. But going from the $CDMaterials line, you may just want to remove the "usermod/materials" part from the start of it.

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

What do you mean stretch out body part using mutliple bones -

In the example of the cube you posted, instead of having a single bone in the center of the cube that you scale, you could have a bone at every corner of the cube, which you can then move away from each other, so it would look like it grows. Of course, with high-poly models, this isn't really practical to do for every vertice, so for something like a sword, you could have a bone for the bottom of the handle, two or three bones for the sides of the handle, and a last bone at the tip of the blade, which you then weight-paint to look okay when you pull the bones close together.

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

- also does editing the source of smd tools help maybe re write it to support scale -

Feel free to try yourself or get a friend to try, just be aware that the SMD and DMX formats themselves still don't support bone scaling (and that's how VALVe made the formats, which noone can change), so there is nowhere to write the scale of bones to in the files, meaning it's objectively-speaking impossible.

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

could someone please walk me through on how i can get the sword to be invisible for all tf2 taunt animations

As you would have to edit the taunt animations in the first place anyway, you could simply move the weapon entirely off-screen (like thousands of units below the ground or something).

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

Blender source tools -

Again, the Source engine itself doesn't support bone scaling in animations, and as a result, you can't use bone scaling in animations in Source, which is NOT due to errors in the Blender Source Tools, but due to missing features in the Source engine itself.

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

- Blender works fine with the scale animation why did they disable it -

VALVe did not disable bone scaling in animations when they made Source. They didn't make it in the first place.

Artfunkel did not disable bone scaling in animations, either, Blender just throws errors when it's told to export a thing into a file, when said file doesn't support said thing. (Specifically export bone scale animation into SMD/DMX, which doesn't support bone scaling, because VALVe didn't make that when they made the Source engine nor its formats.) At least in this case.

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

- i didn't get a valid answer you just said it wasn't programmed that way. -

The fact that bone scaling is not in Source should be enough to make you understand why you can't export bone scaling in animations for Source.

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

- Well why would they program only location and rotation and not scale did they just assume people didn't use scale -

No, they didn't assume people didn't use scale, they knew they themselves would not use scale, and if they would not use it, then programming it in is only a waste of time and resources and money, especially considering people who would find a use for bone scaling could easily find work-arounds (such as using multiple bones to stretch out a body part).

Or if you mean about why Artfunkel didn't program it in for the Blender Source Tools, it's because the SMD/DMX formats themselves don't support bone scaling (thus there's no way to export it, thus there's no way to program how to export it).

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

- i mean i'm pretty sure alot of people here wants their animation to have some kind of scaling. -

The majority of people will either make models for Garry's Mod or Source FilmMaker (where the bones can be scaled individually by a user, and models are also posed without pre-existing sequences most of the time) or as a mod for games (such as a different player model in a game), where they will want to keep it looking a lot the same (with things not growing/shrinking and the animations are often the same) as without mods, only few making actual animations through the Blender Source Tools, and by far fewer wanting to scale bones in animations, and only very few of those few people wouldn't be able to make a work-around for it.





TL;DR: VALVe did not make bone scaling for animations in Source. Nothing can be done about that, no matter how much you want it.
Because of that, the Blender Source Tools do not and can not support bone scaling either, and there is nothing that can be done about that, besides trying to work around it with other methods.

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

- I'm very disapointed in this source tools things -

By "Source Tools things", do you mean the Blender Source Tools or the Source engine?

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

You serious? -

Yes. The Source engine doesn't support scaling in animations. (It does however support scaling, even scaling individual bones in some cases, through coding... but this is stuff to be hard-coded into the game itself, not into the animations. See Team Fortress 2's mini spell and re-size plugins for servers. I'm not sure about this stuff outside Team Fortress 2, though, and again, this is nothing you can mess with as an animator.)

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

- the animation plays fine -

That's because Blender supports bone scaling in animations (unlike Source and its formats).

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

Why is it like [whether Source supports scaling] is my question? -

It's not, we only explained that to help you understand why it doesn't work, rather than just saying "it doesn't work".

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

- as i said scaling is really useful in animation it's really used alot i mean why would they disable this i look at this like a bug tbh? -

They didn't disable it, they never programmed it in the first place. As someone said to me about a missing feature in a fan-game once (despite said feature being documented both online and in-game), "lack of support for a feature is not a bug".

{GPG} Waka Flocka Flame lähetti viestin:

- With all that being said what else can i do to make scaling animations work for source engine/TF2

As xDShot™ proposed, you can try using a flex to make the bone(s) seem to grow/shrink, but I have no idea how to directly use flexes within animations. You can try taking a look at $BoneFlexDriver, but I don't have any clue how that works, let alone for non-"vertex animation" flexes.

You could also try making many different bones for the same body area, and just stretch them out apart from each other to simulate a single bone growing, but this may be weird to work with.

The Source engine itself (and the SMD animation format, and probably the official DMX animation formats too) doesn't support bone scaling in animations. There's nothing that can be done about that.

It would help to know -
- Where the bone(s) are
- What the bone(s) affect
- The "base position" ("T-Pose") of the model
- The expected outcome along with a description of what you did to what bone (such as "I rotated this bone 30 degrees clockwise" with an arrow pointing at a bone)
- The outcome of the compiled model, as a GIF with a transition/blend between the "base position" and the outcome (not as in fading the outcome over the "base position", but seeing the bone rotate bit by bit every frame).

Can I see a screenshot of the Blender interface at the moment you'd click on "Export"? (Make sure to keep the weight link cull threshold value visible in the screenshot.)

xDShot™ lähetti viestin:

Try exporting SMDs

That is also an option, but it is still very worth figuring out if there's a human error or a program error at play here.