.x file exporting from 3DSMax using Skin modifyer
hi,
Is there a version of the MS .x exporter that supports Max's Skin modifyer for wieghted meshes used in animations.
If not, is support for this planned? The Skin modifyer has many advantages over Physique.
Just out of curiosity, what is the main difference between the two that makes Skin unusable with .x? Aren't those modifyers simply interfaces for a vertex weight value? Its just a weight value in the end! :)
[433 byte] By [
urgrund] at [2008-2-28]
I have been beating myself up trying to get get x files to export correctly from 3ds max 5 and 7
I cant seem to get the microsoft exporter for max 7 to export anything correctly, animations wont load into mesh viewer... skinning dosnt work so on and so forth...
and when i use the panda x file exporter bones stretch un predictably or the file simply dosnt load.
What did microsoft use to make and export tiny?
I think the Panda exporter can be used to convert complex meshes that were built with a Skin modifier. However the export process can be quite "fussy", ie. a model that works in MAX might not work once eXported.
Some general things to look out for are - ensure the bone hierarchy is a single tree structure, ensure all vertices are weighted to at least one bone, and that the weights on each vertex add up to 1.0
I always start by weighting all vertices to the pelvis (root bone), and then weight each limb outwards, testing the integrity of the eport at each stage.
I find that panda (or max) has some issues with apparently random rescaling on bones, you cant use objects with any negitive scale values (something max loves) it gets messy with cloned objects and some times there are just random errors that wont allow me to load an animated mesh. And make sure you dont have any objects with the same name.
Does anyone know the reason the xfile is so poorly supported?
The xfile isues have set me back months on my game, and its forcing me to switch to md3 format, its easier to write a loader for a file format then it is to get the xfile loaders working.
Urgent problem.
My scene looks fine in 3DSMax7.
It is a character who holds several items one at a time.
The character is set up with CAT (works fine) though the skeleton crunches after exporting to .x (using Panda), easily reset in max by resetting the cat skin pose.
Anyway, the obects are the problem. They are animated using the position and rotation constraints to jump to the hands or to an out of the way place and they just follow the hands or stay still. In max it looks fine, and the keyframing is spot on (and I used various tangent variations without any changes). In Meshviewer the objects float around in apparently random positions.
I used a maxscript to duplicate the pos-constrained objects into meshes with keyframes in their world coordsys (baking the animation from the original object) but even these un-constrained objects float in meshviewer. I've exported a lot of CAT animation with Panda and it works fine most of the time, but I can't seem to account for this object problem. What happens is that if there are keys holding the object on the floor, before it snaps to the hands, meshviewer seems to ignore those and tween the object from the floor to the hands over time. Also, static objects that are meant to be out of the way seem to want to sit in other places in the .x file. I don't get it at all, having tried reset xforms, keying every frame, removing links, and seperating different actions to different max files before export.
I even tried deleting unneeded CAT layers and so on, as well as skinning the objects to dummies rather than keyframing their transforms. The scale of the model is about 100 Max generic units, and the cat scale is .86
We had some trouble with characters modeled very small (.05 cat units) but those were fixed just by making the character bigger.
tomacmuni@gmail.com
