Hoping this catches the eyes of bond1 or anyone else that may be out there that can shed some light. Any insight is appreciated!
The Breakthrough
Through a very painful trial and error process, I was able to get a custom character in MAX. This means a custom armature, multiple meshes parented to the armature (eyes, blinking eyelids, hair cards, etc.), and custom animations. Maybe I'm not the first blender user to successfully do this, but I've thoroughly combed over the forums many times and could not see any advice or examples of seeing others doing this.
Despite the woes of trying to import a character into MAX, I have spat in the face of the 90 degree rotation bug, and no longer does my character's separate mesh pieces appear in weird places, such as his eye blinking on his crotch in the importer. The best part is that I took lots of notes on how to avoid these common issues that I am sure many Blender users have experienced. It works perfectly with the NPC controller as well. However... I have a hit another wall to my progress, and I am not sure if there is anymore room to go further on my end-possibly.
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The Problem**
I don't know if this is all uncharted territory, if it is, maybe we can put our heads together and figure it out...but there seems to be a bug with my custom character where only parts of him animate, while the rest of him doesn't. This is easily corrected if you simply click on him in the editor, and all of him animates correctly. He works fine in the play-test as well. The real issue with this starts to happen when I add another character in the editor, and only one character can fully animate at a time while the other experiences this bug. If any of this is confusing, I can always upload a video in this thread.
Lastly, if i create a stand-alone it doesn't matter if there is one character or several, they all have issues where they partially animate. For some reason, this felt a bit crushing. Perhaps it's that I have gone through so many difficult hoops of getting to the point of it appearing to work, only to have this happen as a last "gotchya!"
Tried Solutions
During my trial and error phase, Necrym59 was able to convert my character and reimport him using .X, which fixed the issues I was having in the editor and standalone. He has some cool tools to help with this, but alas I have none. I have tried this with using a combination of old Blender versions, but the old versions do not support importing modern .FBX files. I also cannot find a free converter that will allow me to convert this into a .X from any type of .FBX file versions from the last 5 years.
Is there something I am missing here? I feel that I am so close to making this happen, and as a result I can produce a step by step guide that can help the MAX community to allow more animated game assets for people to share and further customize their projects.
Other Info that might help us understand the problem
1.) If the character "isn't a character" and he has his collision changed, and is considered "static" in the game, he animates perfectly without any issues in the stand-alone or in the editor.
2.) I did get another character with a custom armature and multiple parented mesh objects imported slightly over a year ago. He didn't have any of these issues (check out the video below). Perhaps an update has caused this bug between now and then? Maybe I just got lucky?
https://youtu.be/pkIotkx5fc4
3.) I heard that a stock rig with all stock names for the bones has to be used for "custom" characters. I've worked around this...but maybe there is still something I don't understand causing this problem in the editor?
