Thursday, August 13, 2009

3ds max animation export hell

11 more days of hellish work! Yes, I am in 3D Studio Max hell right now, certainly on my way out, but not just yet..

So last month my contract was coming to an end at the game company, and I had it renewed by offering to solve the animation problems they had with their 3DS Max animation files... things got to a late start so I've only been on it for a week now, working on only ONE animation, which lasts about 30 seconds... It has about 100 objects in it, most of them animated... and half of them have one kind of problem or another... With 90% of this scene done (and I will finish it today), here is the ONE thing 3ds Max animators out there should know, specially if you are animating for a game engine or exporting your animations to another program:

NEVER EVER work in the View Coordinate System. This option should simply be destroyed and deleted from the program all together, BAD IDEA Autodesk! Why? First of all, there are about 5 other coordinate systems you can use, all of them perfectly fine, such as World, Local, Screen, Parent, etc... These other modes will leave all your objects transforms and rotations as you expect them to be. but View mode... WON'T. So when you export your objects, they will probably be facing the wrong direction, now imagine what happens to 50 animated objects when you are using the View mode constantly... A big time consuming mess to fix... How do you fix this? Briefly put, you will have to reset the pivots to correctly match your World Coordinate system, reset any transforms and or scaling, reset the Xform (collapse too) to set it all down and then check out how your animation is looking. If it is still messed up you will have to change the animation axis in the motion panel (just flip through until you find the one that looks right). I advice you to work on a duplicate of a scene if you are making repairs of this sort, so if things get ugly you can always re-merge the object you are working on. Sometimes it will be best to make a fresh dummy, copy the animated keyframes to it, delete them from your object, align it's pivot to the dummy and then link the object to the fresh dummy. Of course, if you never export from 3D max, you'll never know what is going on, everything will look ok in Max...

And guess what? view coordinate system is the default! Yikes! And since 3dMax remembers which system you are working in for EACH kind of transformation, you have to be careful about this. The best thing to do is to start up your scene and select each transformation tool one at a time and set the Coordinate system to World for each tool, then start working. Oh yeah, and this is also important to watch out when you move your textures around (UV wraps and stuff), because the texture transforms also are set to View Coor. system by default...

Thankfully I started with one of the more complex scenes... 9 more to go... and finish in 11 days...-___-

And here is another tip for any 3d animation software, which should be obvious, but yeah, easily overlooked as I have experienced:

If you will be exporting to a game engine, please find out what the limitations of the engine camera are and how to set up your animation program camera to match it.... BEFORE you start animating! This is specially vital for realtime cut-scenes! (it's not so relevant for in-game animated objects).

Your technical artists will love you for it! `__'

1 comment:

  1. haha so righteous about 3Ds MAX, YEP!

    ..truly useful post.. thank you

    ReplyDelete