Artist's Corner

Splitting a mesh in 3Ds Max

Bijaz — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:50:25 GMT

Does anyone know if its possible to select faces of an Editable Poly mesh and have them removed from the current mesh into a new one?

morph angle deformer (3ds max) not supported?

Graham Luke — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:20:17 GMT

A "Morph Angle Deformer" is a sub-tool in the Skin modifier, used to morph at certain joint angles (i.e. the pinch of an elbow). In XNA, my morph is unrecognized.

I see that XNA doesn`t support morph targets. Is this the same thing?

What are my choices here? Do I implement morphs myself? I was surprised to find little chatter about this. I don`t know how anyone lives without this kind of Deformation.

Thank you for any guidance.

Help for Blender/XNA fbx importing. PLEASE HELP IM SO SAD !

Harminal — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 07:16:16 GMT

So i was trying to import an fbx file but it failed with this problem

Error 1 Error normalizing vertex bone weights. BoneWeightCollection does not contain any weighting values.

So then i decided to try get a FBX importer recommended by stromcode but when i try to put it in my blender scripts folder, I cant even find the scripts folder

PLEASE HELP ME! im so sad this has failed

what programs i need for modeling

iozk — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:52:07 GMT

I do not know which program to use, I use blender, but just to know how the modeling and all these things but I want to make levels, characters and environments with a good look at reality
What programs do you recommend I use?

Skinning Sample - The Dude

Craig Martin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:20:52 GMT

Nice sample, but pity an idle animation wasn't also included, along with a mechanism to transition from idle -> walking -> idle.

Maybe Skinned Model Extension 2 ;)

Simple Vector/Path Extruding Help

Etherael — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:08:13 GMT

I have an assignment for a game programming class that requires us to incorporate 3D models in the XNA environment to make a game.

Essentially, I want the equivalent of drawing a square in SketchUp, and extruding it straight up with the Push/Pull tool, only instead of a square, it's a music note, a flower, or star. The problem is I have the shapes I want in Illustrator, but I can't get the vector paths anywhere I can do extruding with to save them as a .x (or .fbx) model for XNA.

I'm very frustrated. I don't want to have to redraw all the paths in SketchUp or Blender. Any suggestions?

[SOLVED] [Maya 2009 - fbx exporting] - combined polygons exported doubled

nitux — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:20:31 GMT

Using maya 2009 I've built two simple polygons: a polygonal sphere and a polygonal thorus; I've combined and merged them to make one model.
When I load the model (exported like fbx model) in XNA it draws it doubled; I tried it with an other fbx viewer and I obtain the same result.
I link two pictures:
in Maya
in XNA

UV problems with BLENDER.

c64days — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:16:47 GMT

hello everybody.

I have problems when exporting a textured model when the texture was not build using the UV EDITOR.

when saving and loading as BLEND file everything working normally, but when exporting it to 3ds DAE or any other format no DSI and nor Visual studio finding any textures in it.

actually Visual studio (XNA) reporting this error:

Error 1 BasicMaterial has a texture, but the mesh "Sphere" has geometry that does not contain texture coordinates. C:\Users\hido\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\The Invaders\The Invaders\Content\models\earth.fbx The Invaders

Any clue what's going on? I've tried everything, and with no success.

my model seems transparent

Attacker — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:52:37 GMT

Hi,

I am trying to do 3d model for game.

I made simple turret. Just cube and cylinder.

I imported model in XNA project and now I can see other end of the cylinder inside the cube.

Is it supposed to be this way? Am I doing something wrong?

Should I delete every poligon inside the model?

3D Level design Measurments?

Grimjovv — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 01:37:15 GMT

My question is what base measurments for a fps game level be should I just take a guess of real world measurements on walls and rooms and make them that big in 3Ds max or will that take up to much memory and slow down my game, on top of that question whats a good poly count to stick to when it comes to level design looking for min, max numbers and all based on a fps style level.

Skinned Model Animation Exploding

redonja — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:00:04 GMT

After a long battle with 3d studio max and MS skinning sample i finally have an animated character working. I only have one problem. If i move the root bone of the biped in 3d studio max any place but the origin (0,0,0) the animation plays back distorted. I feel like i have tried everything but im sure there is something that i am missing. I am sure it has to do with the bind pose and I am exporting the bind pose in the FBX exporter but it doesn't seem to help. I have also tried keying the Bip01 bone ( the root of the hierarchy ) to the proper position with no change. I am currently using a work around by manually offsetting the players position, but as the animations get more complex this will be problematic. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

FBX Weird Animation Glitch

JJoosten — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:55:43 GMT

Hey Guys,

Me and my team are developing an C# XNA game as a school assignment but we ran into a problem regarding FBX.
One of the artists of our team uses Maya for modeling, rigging, animating and skinning, but when we export the model with the Autodesk FBX exporter some weird animation glitch gets in. We have searched for everywhere but we couldn't find any answers so maybe you guys have any idea?

Here is a link to a videofile I have recorded that shows the problem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keG2HyBfvds

All the modeling, rigging, weight painting and animating is done with Maya 2010. We used the default settings in the autodesk FBX exporter and we bake the animation on the bones before we export. In the Maya timeline everything is fine but when we open the FBX after exporting (with the Autodesk FBX viewer our in our XNA game) the glitches are in the animation.

We hope anyone can help.

Greets Juul Joosten

Gmax Plugins?

Midi — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:15:47 GMT

Does anyone know where I can get plugins for Gmax to export 3DS and X filetypes? All I can export is MD3, and nothing I have is compatible with that.

Game artwork Advise 2D

EduardoRD — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:43:11 GMT

Hi everyone, I'm working on a 2d game and we are now concentrating on the engine, but it's almost done, and now we are focusing on graphics development and we want to make it cartoon-like, since our game is 2d we tough about using Toon Boom Animate since it seems to be the leader in 2d graphic development, so I been trying it around for some days and at first impression looks pretty simple, it has IK chains for movement and helps a lot to create characters and make some good looking animations really quick, but the problem is when it comes to make some more complex animations like a character using a sword and wants to swing it side by side, i been doing some research and in fact it is possible but it requires to draw also the same character in different positions like frontside, leftside, backwards and in some angles to create kind of a 360 degrees 2d drawings of your character, so doing a little more research I saw some videos of people using 3ds max and blender to create 2d animations, and the advantage is that when you have a 3d model well rigged you can make pretty much everything that you can imagine, so the thing is to decide which tool is better for this task, I managed to create a similar model in 3ds max and with a cell shading and a simple contour looks like 2d but it's way more time consuming than creating it in TBA.
So i'm looking for advise to see what would be best to create the artwork of a 2d game?
Any advise is strongly appreciated.
Thanks!

The characters from my game

Mackenzie Kelechi — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:27:00 GMT

These are the three main characters in my upcoming action adventure RPG they are Max in the middle, his brother Jack on the right and his sister Kiki on the left. I will answer any question in the forum so information that I'm willing to share on the lore of theses characters will be given out based on the questions you ask. I'm doing this because it allows me to personally connect with the people who are interested in the world I have created, I feel its better than just posting something and leaving people with just that. Also note everything they are wearing has cultural and personal significance.

So go ahead and ask away

Mirrored object not rendering (3Ds Max 9 - FBX)

Bijaz — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:01:13 GMT

I have a ship model that has a sail on both sides. I modeled, rigged and animated it one one side, then copied all the sail objects/bones and moved them to the other side of the ship and mirrored + animated that side, but for some reason when I get it into XNA it wont render the side that is the copy (or it could be rendering it in the exact same place as the original sail I guess, I have had a few problems where objects act like they're ignoring the SKIN modifier, still following the bones animation path, but not in the same place they are when viewed in max, i.e. not in the same location as the bone.).

I have a few other objects that i have copied and mirrored that are rendering fine.

I've tried this with just drawing the model, and I've tried it with the skinned model sample to view the animation. Any tips/advice on how to solve this problem? :)

Error loading *.fbx file - content pipeline error

ElSanto — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:50:22 GMT

Hi there!
To introduce myself - I am a total newbie at XNA and 3D programming. I modeled a little house in Blender (version 2.48).
I exported that model to fbx format and tried to add it to the content pipeline of my game project.
When ever I try to compile/run my project - I end up with the following error message in visual studio 2008:

Fehler   3   Building content threw InvalidOperationException: Position index out of range. VertexContent.PositionIndices contains a value outside of the range of the parent MeshContent.Positions collection.
   bei Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Graphics.IndirectPositionCollection.get_Item(Int32 index)
   bei Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Graphics.IndirectPositionCollection.<GetEnumerator>d__0.MoveNext()
   bei Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Graphics.IndirectPositionCollection.CopyTo(Vector3[] array, Int32 arrayIndex)
   bei Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Processors.VertexBufferContent.Write[T](Int32 offset, Int32 stride, IEnumerable`1 data, TargetPlatform targetPlatform)
   bei Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Graphics.VertexContent.CreateVertexBuffer(VertexBufferContent& vertexBuffer, VertexElement[]& vertexElements, TargetPlatform targetPlatform)
   bei Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Processors.ModelProcessor.ProcessMesh(MeshBonePair meshBonePair, ContentProcessorContext context)
   bei Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Processors.ModelProcessor.Process(NodeContent input, ContentProcessorContext context)
   bei Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.ContentProcessor`2.Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.IContentProcessor.Process(Object input, ContentProcessorContext context)
   bei Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.BuildCoordinator.BuildAssetWorker(BuildItem item)
   bei Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.BuildCoordinator.BuildAsset(BuildItem item)
   bei Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.BuildCoordinator.RunTheBuild()
   bei Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Tasks.BuildContent.RemoteProxy.RunTheBuild(BuildCoordinatorSettings settings, TimestampCache timestampCache, ITaskItem[] sourceAssets, String[]& outputContent, String[]& rebuiltContent, String[]& intermediates, Dictionary`2& dependencyTimestamps, KeyValuePair`2[]& warnings)   C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\Chriss\Desktop\WinFormsGraphicsDeviceSample\WinFormsGraphicsDevice\Content\models\haustest.fbx   Content

I have no idea where that error message comes from - because other model (less complex) just work fine. Could it be a bug in the importer?

Any tips would be very welcome - because I'm already at the end of my very limited knowledge about Blender and fbx :-/

Terrain drawing problem

Aleksandar — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:37:48 GMT

I'm having some issues with drawing terrain. I'm using XNA's code generated geometry sample for my terrain processing. The Draw method is same as the one in sample but still i get some wierd problems, terrain (letters) have holes in it... Any sugestions?

Screen Samples of my Game!

Jason Bienvenu — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:30:57 GMT

Hey Guys

Here's a couple of Screen Samples for the X Box Live Title "The Atlantian" Im doing all the artwork and I have a composer, so now Im just looking for a programmer. Anyway heres a couple of samples from Level's 1 and 4. I hope you dig!

LEVEL 1

LEVEL 4

showing off some art

black reaper — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:58:10 GMT

hello,

I've been around for a couple of year learning xna, even though I'm a artist. I just got the latest Zbrush app so I wanted to share my last model.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_oToi7BocU5c/SvVxdMMaLkI/AAAAAAAAAAU/ryOsCzKaapU/s1600-h/side.BMP

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_oToi7BocU5c/SvVxrQDlJwI/AAAAAAAAAAc/0jzK3S5ycuo/s1600-h/front_face.jpg

cheers

Blender, the way it actually is.

pixelminerXNA — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:47:04 GMT

It seems to me there are people on this forum who might need a nudge in the right direction when getting started with Blender. I am by no means the last word on Blender but I've been through all the confusion people who are new to Blender might go through so I think I can be of some help to people who are open minded enough to try something new. You got a Blender question? Post it here and I'll try my best to answer it.

And to start things off I'll pick up from the thread I was commenting on. Daaark this one's for you. Hope you find me here.:

>>I'll be importing a big scene in there soon. That will determine if me and Blender can be friends. Last time, the far clip was limited to a very small value like 500, when I need a lot more than that.

Yeah, you can extend it to 5000 by going in to view<-view properties and setting the clip end to 5000. 5000 unfortunately is the limit though. I've actually exchanged e-mails with Ton, the project lead on Blender, about this issue and it's not going to be extended anytime soon for technical reasons. Luckily, Blender has pretty good granularity in sub single digit distances so you should be able to fit a decent sized scene in it even if you may have to scale it down a little. Working with sub single digit size things in other packages may not be as easy. I know for a fact that 3DS Max can't handle stuff smaller then 1x1x1 very well.

>>I've already found those options, and I've got my default 4 views set up with CTRL-U.

Cool!

>>Does having the panel on the side work out good? I'd prefer that, especially on my widescreen setup.

Yeah. I have panels on both sides of the screen, kind of like Maya's setup with the outliner on screen left and button window down screen right. But the cool thing is that you don't have to be locked in to variants of this setup for your Blender session. I personally use this panel setup for modeling only.

If you look at the top of the application window you should see a button with something like "SR:2-Model". That's the button you can use to switch workspace configurations on the fly. Click on the up and down arrow next to the text and it will give you a drop down list listing different options plus the option to add a new one. If you choose a different item from it then you'll see your workspace switch completely giving you different window setups for different tasks. And unlike single default state programs like most of the other 3d apps, those choices are not baked in to the system but rather reside inside the Blender file so you can change them all you like and even create new ones without affecting the default in your default file. Of course if you decide you like your setup better then you can always just overwrite the default with ctrl+u.

I personally have a custom set up I use just for UV'ing models in addition to ones that were in the original default file. It consists of a small 3D window screen left top so I can choose the model, an outliner below it so I can see the model hierarchies, a UV/Image window in the middle and the button window screen right.

Happy Blendering!

Blender - Textures and .fbx

brockmeister — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 08:18:58 GMT

Hi all,

I'm a super newbie, and am trying to display a cube with a texture loaded from a .png file I have.

I have tryed drawing the cube in blender, and adding the texture under the links and pipeline option. I can get the model to display in blender with the texture, but when I export it, I can't get the texture to come up. I've tryed doing what they do in the tutorial and putting the model in the models folder and my .png file I used for the texture in the textures folder.

Does anyone know of any good walkthroughs available for creating a .fbx (model and associated texture) file in blender. I'm assuming I'm doing something wrong with the export process...

Cheers,

Mark.

Question about Maya Visibility option in XNA

ChrisOfTheDead — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:07:55 GMT

I'm working on a game with my friend, and my job is to make everything you see and I am by no means a programmer.

But I have a question, If I export a textured model from Maya into XNA in an FBX format, is there a way to turn visibility on and off for specific models while in Microsoft Visual like you can in Maya?

I ask because if there is a way to toggle visibility, I may not have to make 50+ animations for the model I made.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

TurboSquid Models into Blender 3d Help.

Schallerwf — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:45:22 GMT

Recently I have been trying to download a 3d model into Blender from TurboSquid.com. I then try and open the OBJ file with Blender but I get an error message. " Unknown file type or error, check console", There is probably some little thing I'm missing and no one else seems to have this problem. Please help, tell me what I'm doing wrong,
Thanks Willy.

Digital Inking

aurelious — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:15:29 GMT

I am very bad with digital inking, so should I just go with a pencil and adjust the contrast with Photoshop unless someone has an easier way for me to Ink my sketches (besides using sketch pens)).