I'm working on a project that needs some simple animated characters. We have an animator that works in Maya 2010 and 2013 and I am doing scene modeling in 3ds Max 2012. The requirement is to make a workflow, getting an animated character from Maya to Irrlicht in the .x format. I should point out that I'm not really experienced in working in Maya nor doing animation of any kind so I can only relay what our animator says about the subject.
After numerous attempts to make a good exporting workflow, we tried exporting from Maya to FBX, then importing to Max (and directly to Fragmotion), exporting to .x, .b3d and .ms3d but the results were always problematic, glitchy movement, lots of trouble with making baked animation (the .x exported model isn't animated etc). The last thing we tried was using Maya 2013 to transfer to Max 2013 via direct connect. Then saving the mesh to a Max 2012 format (because of the Panda .x exporter), exporting to .x from Max 2012, then loading it in Fragmotion to check out how the .x file turned out. This seems to work very well, however there's a very weird issue. Our animator took one of our existing character meshes that was already bone rigged, made a little walking animation and we did the whole exporting procedure. The result was ok, the mesh was upside down and scaled in fragmotion (.x) but after flipping it, it was ok.
But when she took another character (all character look the same btw, they have the same mesh appearance) with an identically rigged bone structure, exported to .x and we get this:
Here's how it looks animated:
The mesh is way out of place, not centered and gets deformed in animation. Now, I can move the mesh in an approximate location to the bones, but that's not really a solution. The floating flat polys above the character's head are used for eyebrows, eyes and mouth animation and are also very misaligned. I should mention that loading this .x mesh directly into Irrlicht gives the same results as in Fragmotion.
The weird thing is that every character our animator creates, makes a completely new bone structure and re-rigs it, it always turns out this like this, with misaligned mesh. Also, we tried to use the bones of the "good" character and rig them onto the mesh of the "bad" character and we still get the misaligned result. However, that first, "good" mesh and bones are pretty much perfect when exported, and we just can't figure out why that is. We can use this "good" character for the time being, for testing animation etc. but it's in no way a solution as any new rigged character, rigged and made in the exact same procedure as the "good" one gives us a misaligned result.
We've tried just about any combination of exporting options with no success. We even tried exporting one scene with both of the meshes, the good and the bad one together, side by side, and the good one is still ok while the other gets this misaligned bone-mesh result, even when tampering with every combination of exporting options in the Panda .x exporter. So this leads me to believe that there is some difference in the very meshes used but we don't know what this difference is.
I've also found this topic http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/forum/v ... =1&t=44841 where a user suggests deleting history and freeze transformations and our animator was doing this the whole time in all our tests, but this problem still persists.
Has anyone had similar problems or maybe has some idea why such a misalignment can happen? It's obvious that there is a way of getting a good result as the first mesh has perfect bone alignment and animation.
Thanks.
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