3dsmax Rig/Export Problem

[SidV]

Hi Guys,

i just registered and this is my first post. i am fairly new to the whole game modding community and to UDK of course.

i ve made a Custom Char in 3ds max, rigged and skinned it and tryed to export the mesh and a simple walkcycle to UDK. By pressing the save mesh button i get that error message "Unmatched node ID". So i googled and saw thats a pretty common error message caused by meshes in the scene that the exporter cannot associate with a bone. I just cant figure out what he wants from me since everything is within a single hierachy and every skinned bone is actually a bone.

I have a IK Leg with a reversed foot rig. The foot is linked to a spline to move it around. i get rid of the error message at first by linking the foot control splines back to root bone.

Now i can import the mesh and animation in UDK, and everything looks fine except that the bones beneath the ankle doesnt move at all and stay in place while the rest of the body following the animation.

So,here are my questions. What went wrong? How can i fix that? How you guys rig your Characters for UDK?

Any answers to those question are very much appreciated.

[fritzmonkey]

Do you have a hidden mesh? Try exporting only selected with your character selected.

[SidV]

i tryed that, still get error messages :(

[SidV]

Still trying to fix it.

http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/4354/footrig.jpg

linking the control spline back to the root bone makes no sense and actorx is still complaining. i assume the problem is because there is no direct connection between the leg bone chain and the reverse foot bone chain since the ik chain is the only connection between those chains.

i know there are a lot of other ways for leg rigs, but this is the way i like to rig and i m doing it for years cause its really comfortable to animate. also its very common way to rig in max. So, before i try anything else i want to be sure there is no way this could work.

any suggestions?

[Havoc89]

I havnt made a custom rig yet for UE3, but I am making an assumption based on the UT3 setup. You should have 2 rigs in total, one is your animation control rig, and the other is the one that you mesh will be skinned to. You simply get the rig that will be skinned to the character to follow the the animation rig.

Your animation rig can be setup the way you want (with all your blending rigs and animation controllers), and I believe the rig that will be skinned should have a simple FK styled hierachy where one bone is the child of another and not using any animation controllers.

So this way when you export, you only export your mesh with the rig that the mesh is skinned to, while the animation rig is only there for you to be able to animate that rig in animation packages such as max and maya.

This is my guess, so I'm not sure actually.

[SidV]

yeah, you right. easiest way to do would be to skin a blend bone chain, driven by the ik chain. i ll try that :)

[Hitpawz]

What you should do is save a copy of your animation file in max and then go to the motion tab (looks like a cart wheel to the right of the heirachy tab).

Select ALL of the bones on the entire skeleton and then click trajectories. Wait a minute or so as this process is complex. You should see red path lines for all bones...a big mess.

Under Sample Range: set the start and end times to match your animation. The start time should probably be frame 0 unless your animation is different. The # of samples should match the total number of frames so that a keyframe is dropped for every frame instead of skipping some.

Under Collapse Transform: click the Collapse button. Wait a minute or two.

Now try to export your character animation and it should work. I haven't tried this but I've exported animations for many engines that require FK only and its' the IK motion that isn't being taken into the exported file. Collapsing trajectories essentially bakes the animation onto the bones by taking whatever translation they are in at each frame and keyframing that with simple position/rotation keys. One way to test that it worked in max is to go and delete the IK controllers and make sure the animation still plays the same.

Be warned this is a destructive process and will destroy your clean keyframes that you used with your IK setup so that's why the first thing I mentioned is you NEED to save a copy of your animation file otherwise you can no longer go back and edit the motion due to each and every frame now being locked in. My naming convention for animations are "anim_IK" and "anim_FLAT" and that tells me which files I can edit. You can edit the IK ones and then save them, collapse the trajectories and then resave over _FLAT.

I hope this works as I will have the same problem.

From the description of the error, it sounds like either there is a vertex or an entire object which is not skinned to a bone. If it all looks good in max, check that an object isn't merely linked to a bone as that will appear the same. If you find an object that's linked to a bone and not skinned, unlink it and add the skin modifier and just add that one bone to the list. The animation will run the same this way and you should no longer have any unassociated objects. If you still get the error, double check your skin weights by grabbing the root bone and moving it a thousand units in any one direction. All verts that are skinned to bones must have the weights add up to 100 or they will drag behind and usually crash any engine that tries to import them. A vert that adds up to 99 will most likely look correct in the animation until it is moved vastly away from the skin pose, so that's why you want to move it thousands of miles away and then check for any stretched vertexes.

[SidV]

thx, for the detailed reply. turns out i had some errors in my rig as i had no single hierachy in my bone chains. i made an ik/fk system for the leg and skinned just the blend bones that got driven trough orientation constraints. that fixed it for me.