Hi all, I'm having serious difficulty exporting a character's animations from 3D Max 9 into FBX. I've tried to find a solution with numerous searches but they all seem to assume construction using Biped? I have used bones with IKLimbs and an HI Solver. As such, all the animation keyframes are in the pivot points of the solvers, not the bones themselves.

Whenever I export the FBX and then view the result in Max, the solvers seem to have broken. The model no longer animates, but moving the bones still deforms the mesh as one would expect.

Can FBX support the solvers, and if not, what would be a good way of collapsing these into bone keyframes somehow?

I am admittedly getting errors when Importing back into Max, but I can't quite figure them out:



Thanks!

This is just a stab in the dark, because I'm not a modeler, and I've only worked with Maya, but I had similar issues getting a Maya model to import correctly into XNA. Is there a way for you to bake the animations? I'm pretty sure that IK data is not stored in the FBX format, and even if it were, I don't think XNA would know what to do with it, anyway, so you have to bake all of your animation data.

Maybe you should download a new version of your FBX converter, it is free and you can find it on the Autodesk website.

There might actually be a workaround for this.

I just started dabbling into XNA, but I've been animating for a few years and doing rigging even longer.  For my most recent project (in Unreal) we were using a two skeleton system.  We used Biped for the control rig (the one we animated with), and a bone rig constrained to biped with position and orientation constraints.  This allowed us to set up dummy objects, weapon stand-ins, and all sorts of hierarchy changes on the biped.  We then baked the animations on to to the bone skeleton, skinned the mesh to the bone skeleton, and exported those without the biped.

You might be able to bake the movements of the controls onto the actual bones and export that to get the keys you want on the actual bones without having to mess with code.

In Max, in the 'Motion' tab (the one that looks like a wheel), there's a trajectories button.  After you've animated, select your whole bone skeleton, and click this button.  Select the start and end times for the animation, and the number of samples (this will be the number of keyframes it places for every bone, divided evenly over the duration of the animation).  For simplicity sake, if you do a 0-100 frame animation, and specify 10 samples, it'll place a keyframe every 10 frames (100/10=10).  Once that's entered correctly, make sure 'Position' and 'Rotation' are checked in the "Collapse Transform" box, and click collapse.  This will create position/rotation keys for each bone on your biped at the specified intervals.  The bones should rememer this information on export because it is using the raw position and rotation information of the actual bones, not the controls for the bones.

Hope this helps =)