Softimage to UDK, and GEAR to UDK

[mirko_j]

hello,

I was wondering if there is anyone here that could give me a bit more insight in state of Softiamge working with UDK, experiences and problems encountered.
Also i saw video where species addon is used for rigging and exporting animations to UDK and works perfectly.
I was wondering if anyone got idea if it ispossible to have GEAR rig to work with UDK as well?
Thank's in advance!

Mirko

[RT-Visualization]

Hi there, I'm the guy who made the promo videos for Species

I didn't have much experience with GEAR to be honest, and from what I've seen it requires more effort to build a rig with it, but hey, its free, so fair enough
Pretty much it has more automatized stuff rather if you build the rig completely from scratch ( which I did using Digital Tutors tutorial...man, that is time consuming! )

The most important thing exporting from Softimage to UDK is the bone structure, which can be viewed and copied ( name the bone as in 3ds ) from the available rig from the 3ds max model downloadable from the Epic documentation ( Marcus character with the rig set )

Basically you can export everything ( static, skeletal and characters ) from Softimage to UDK
About skeletal I suggest you to take a look at this tutorial
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BWiy...feature=relmfu

For some quick tips about Softimage to UDK check out my youtube channel, there are some tricks on how to export, assign material to cluster, and so on

Right now the thing that bothers me most is the scale of the export: basically you need to have some kind of reference in your Softimage scene ( 96 units is the standard height for a character )
On the documentation says that 1UDK unit is 2cm, so the character height is 192cm, so if you do 192cm:96udk-unit=100cm:50udkunit
This mens that, if you want to do correctly sized modeling in Softimage, set the grid space at 50 units ( for 1 meter ) or to 5 ( 10cm ) and you're done

ASE should export the scale properly, but check FBX export because it can screw up the scale export ( you can choose the scale to be used while exporting )

If you have any other questions just ask

[mirko_j]

I;ve noticed that scale is weird and exported to UDK is soooo small.
Species looks great and would be solution for a lot of situations but problem is with non humanoid characters, like upper part humanoid zombie and lower part cyber mechanical legs or something.
That is where gears shines for me as I can combine and rig non humanoid characters.

Seems like problem is because in shadow rig for gear there are nulls and implicite objects that actually deforms mesh and from what i saw, rotation is exported but translation are not working even when everything is ploted.
Tried both ActorX and FBX.

So species would be great solution but with couple characters that are non humanoid gear would be another solution but can;t get it to work with UDK at all and as I just recently started checking out UDK for possible project that limits my understanding as well.

[RT-Visualization]

As far as the problem is related to the rig the only thing the you could do is try to modify the shadow rig itself, but then again, its time consuming and you really need to experiment a lot with it...
About the mechanical rig, what you could do is to add specific geometry in order to achieve the desider movement you're aiming, so you're keeping the rig itself ( with Gear or Species ) and then add what you need...main problem is that usually UDK doesn't like very much non-standard rigs, but you could try do to that anyway...

I don't know how much it would help, but check this out
https://vimeo.com/10211124

[tryphon]

Here is a post i made for the french tutorials using the mod tool 7.5, sure it don't help you a lot, but it says you the xsi works fine with UDK.

http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/...I-mod-tool-7-5

And i don't get any problems, maybe the limitations in exporting files, saving scenes due to the limitations of the mod tool version.
I don' t try to export fbx files, actor X works fine for it.
See this response as a good feed back to xsi.

[mirko_j]

Seems that problem that I have is due to missing or bad hierarchy in GEAR rig shadow nulls.
Someone suggested creating nulls and constraining to implicit objects in shadow rig so that what I'm gonna try. If that work I'm on horse

[mirko_j]

got an solution for transferring char and animation. Now still need to test when going deeper int o UDK part but maybe this can help:

Thanks to ace63 on xsibase for script:

Its actually a simple loop:
Select your deformers and run this as JScript:

function CreateMyShadowRig() {
var aSel = new Array();
aSel = getValue("SelectionList");

for( var i = 0; i < aSel.count; i++) {

var oRoot = Application.ActiveProject.ActiveScene.Root;

var CurrentObject = aSel(i);
var oNullName = GetValue( CurrentObject + ".Name" );
var oNull = oRoot.AddNull( oNullName + "_null" );

oNull.kinematics.AddConstraint( "pose", aSel(i), 0);
}
}

CreateMyShadowRig();

Then this is what I did, maybe someone with more insight into UDK itself can test it as well and see if everything is correct:

Got gear sample man rig into UDK working. One thing is that I needed turn off animate rotation only in UDK and then recompres animation there to remove some warning but it works
So it owul dbe something like this:
1- create GEAR rig form guide
2- create nulls on deformetrs with script
3- envelope to new nulls, not gear deformers.
4- animate
5- select geometrys and created nulls / shadow rig, plot, export selection to FBX
6- import in UDK, select animation in imported obj, turn of use rotation only o anim tab and recompres animation.

Then the rest of the process that goes in UDK, still didn't work on that but at least got character moving ovmpletly in UDK.
Let me know if I miss did something maybe,.
Thanks for the script.