HI guys,

After my little PPI claim windfall I decided to buy a 3DS Max license, yay, so I've decided to go back to trying o animate characters.

Now I have a t-posed character fully rigged in .FBX format, I also have eight duplicates of that character in .FBX format each with a different animation. My plan was to combine them all in animer and import them into GG as one character.

I've tried this a couple of ways;

Firstly by converting them all to .X format, then loading the base character into animer, and importing the animations one by one. Now this works to an extent, except that each animation I import it tells me to change the base pose because its different, if I change it then when I check the animations its limbs flail all about all over the place and if I don't change it I get the same issue.

My second try was by loading each animated character into 3DS Max, saving out the animation on each of them, then loading in the base character and loading each animation into the timeline (remembering to extend the timeline first), in 3DS Max when I test the animations everything works perfectly, it cycles through each animation on the timeline, no problem at all. But when I export it to .X and then load it into animer (to add the FIRESPOT and to label the animations) animer only detects the first 99 frames of animation and nothing more even though there's like 800 frames of animation.

Could anyone help me out and explain what I need to do to get the character and the 8 animations onto one model to import into GG? Is there something 'm missing in 3DS that I need to do before exporting, some setting or something?

Save each anim as a fbx file. then reopen that fbx, and select all.. then in the top menu "animation" save animation.
do that for each anim. then you can load your first fbx, select all and then under animtion menu select load anim.
This gives a menu from witch frame you want to import. and there are some options as relative and absolute.. just try some,... its a bit of trila and error.

if you have all the anims in there, again export as fbx. that will bake the animations into the fbx file ...reopen that and export as x file.

The i Always open the x file in fragmotion, and save it as x file from there, it takes the skinweights over much better then the exporter in 3ds max.
if i use it in GG direct from 3ds max, there are sometimes weird skin twists distorted etc...


I hope you understand it a bit....
and otherwise send me pm with email...

Harry

Awesome thanks, i'll give it a try, just a quick question, and I know it sounds stupid, but I only got 3DS Max yesterday and the controls are so different from Blender, how do I select all? In Blender you just press A twice, is there something similar in Max?

just with your left mouse. select object drag over the objects

Harry

Cheers Harry, much appreciated, i'll check it out tonight when I get home. Hopefully i'll be able to get some character models into GG with some animations that are more natural to the model. 've managed single animations no problem so far, which is ok for quest givers etc that don't need to move much, but I want some decent background civilians walking around, maybe even a pole dancer in the nightclub :p

Just a thought, in Blender when you export you have to select everything before exporting, is that the same with Max?

I've given up for the night, I've spent 7hrs straight trying to get these character animations to import properly and I just can't do it, it looks like i'm going to have to just pose some characters and use them as static models.

See if you have better luck with this plug in for 3ds max from Mark Blosser. (Bond1)

Exports X files perfectly for GameGuru.

http://mjblosser.com/kw-x-port-for-3ds-max/

I'm already using that plugin, it's not working for me, when I export to .x all the limbs go skewif I had a female character with her legs over her shoulders, and it wasn't intentional :p

Hi belidos,

try to import that x file into fragmotion, and from there export.. the export skin weight are better with fragmotion exporter.

I got fragmotion, if you don't have it, send it to me and i can give it a try

Harry

That's what I've been doing ...

1. 3DS: Import animation .fbx -> save animation
2. 3DS: Import model .fbx -> load animation -> export as .fbx -> load the .fbx again (as you said to bake it) -> export .x
3. Fragmotion: Import .x -> export .x
4. GameGuru: Import .x -> edit .fpe and .x (to set textures) -> delete extra .dbo

Getting wavy limbs all stretched and weird.

I finally tried the same, except instead of importing into gameguru I loaded it into animer, saved it again, then run it through mender and created my own .fpe, now it works, although the animations are a little wonky; see the video below, when it walks it skips back a step every couple of steps, any idea why?

in your 3d model program does the character also moves forward...
it looks that way, you have to make the walk sequence on the spot(place)
And gg script gives it forward motion..
edit: maybe it is possible to adjust the script and the walk frames in the fpe file

harry

lucky man!
does the model move in the actual animation? i.e. is it still in the same point but walking on the spot or is it animating and moving forward? if i remember correctly then.
i believe gtox's fish use the animation to move around and dont use any sort of movement in the script at all.. maybe that's what's happening here? she's animating and looking like she's moving forward and also getting moved with GG commands and then the animation goes back to the start - which would reset her location back a bit)

i don't create models so maybe i'm way off though
edit; harry just asked the same so now i feel a lot better about my suggested "fix"

That's exactly it, in 3DS Max she walks to the edge of the box then snaps back. How would I make her walk on the spot in 3D Max? (bare in mind I know absolutely nothing about 3DS Max so you might have to give me instructions in detail right down to which buttons to press)

Actually don't worry, I've worked it out, well not worked out how to change it in 3DS, but in mixamo, I can set it to walk on the spot before downloading the animation.

Well, I had a bit of fun last night animating a character and setting it up for the ai_soldier script and I got it almost right first try.

I used this method:

1. downloaded each animation with skin as .fbx
2. imported each animation into Max, exprted back out as .fbx, then imported it back in and saved the animations.
3. imported a character model without animations, then loaded each animation into the timeline.
4. exported as .x
5. imported into fragmotion and exported directly out again
6. imported into animer, added a FIRESPOT and exported back to .x
7. Created a thumbnail and an FPE and dropped everything into a flder in entitybank

All the AI animations worked perfectly!

Only two issues came up:

Firstly the gun displayed pointing the wrong way and no matter how much I change the position and rotation of the FIRESPOT in animer it just doesn't change its position in GG, and secondly I have no death animation so set it to ragdoll = 1, but when it dies it just freezes in position instead of collapsing, i'll work on it tonight, maybe if I can't get ragdoll to work i'll add a death animation instead.

At least I know how to get animations to work right so I can at the very least start working on a series of non-combat animations for civilians.

I assume that if I want to have custom anims (not AI ones) I would do this in the ;anim part of the FPE:



and then call them in the script.

So two questions now:

What is the LUA script command to run play an animation?

Any tips on fixing the Firespot issue? For some reason changing it in animer just doesn't change it in GG (and yes I am saving it back to the right place and deleting the .obj file)

I do it in fragmotion, and rotate it by trial and error, untill i am
happy with it.

Harry

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=398177770&insideModal=1

hth

3com

Thanks Harry, i'll give it a try, is there anything special I have to do in Fragmotion to create the FIRESPOT? Or is it just a matter of adding a new bone and renaming it to FIRESPOT?

@3Com: Thanks, that helps (Steam's blocked on work laptop so can't check the link, it's odd I can access steam to log in, but once logged in my work server blocks the content ).

So if I want a character with custom animations to turn and wave at the player when they're under a certain distance, then would the following code be correct?

for myself i add the bone in 3ds max, then link it to the hand. so that it moves offcourse with the hand.
then in fragmotion i turn , rotate it to find the correct direction.
It is also possible in fragmotion.
add a bone , name it: FIRESPOT and then link it to the hand.

harry

OK, I've not done any of that in either program yet, not even sure how to manipulate objects in max yet, will have a look tonight.

Thanks.