Sacling an already made animation?

odium

Ok, so heres the deal... We have some pretty damn amazing animations created. But for some retarded reason, the model is too large, and rather than just allow us to set a scale in the weapons .def file, which would be the easier method, he reckons that "wont work" and will break the tangents... Which i don't believe but whatevers...

So at the moment, bit pissed that somebody has done a LOT of amazing work, and is currently getting a bit of a shitty deal...

Anyway, is there a way in Max to scale an already created animation? How much work is this? What I mean by scale, is that atm the weapon and arms are too large, and need to be smaller... Is there any way?

Thanks guys.

Eric Chadwick

In the Utility tab there's a Rescale World Units tool, might do what you want.

odium

Damn typo in the name, lol...

Looks like when I export the mesh, it messes up the verts and isn't right...?

Eric Chadwick

I haven't rigged in awhile, but you might need to save the Skin weights, go to the bind pose, remove the Skin modifier, use Rescale World Units to scale it down, then add the Skin back on and reload your weights.

What format are you exporting to? Custom? Sounds like the programmer needs to do their f'ing job, and stop complaining. It's part of their job to make it easy to get your artwork into the game.

odium

Had this convo, was told that to simply resize the model ingame would "destroy the tangents or make them wrong" on the mesh and result in issues... Never mind most other games do it, for some reason, we can't.

To fix this in code would take a little bit of time, and forever allow us to change scales, something that is quite important anyway.

To fix this in the anim by hand would take ages...

I'm actually quite angry about this still, to be fair. A huge miscommunication, on a subject that should be as easy as saying what needed to be changed, seeing as other media has been around for, oh, over a year, and that was fine... *sigh*

Eric Chadwick

Make an estimate of how long it would take to re-do each of the animations. Include the $ amount this would cost to have the lowest-rank artist on your team spend the time to do it. Or whomever would have to do this tedious task. Also include the schedule offset this would require (this artist's other tasks have to be pushed out).

Show this to the programmer so they can compare it to the cost of their programming time. Also let them know you need approval for this from their boss, as it is a costly detour.

This is a good read on the subject.
Effective 3D Exporter Design
More at the bottom of this page.

Remember, stay positive and stay logical, this is what tends to work well when negotiating with programmers.

Best of luck!

odium

Any coders here, or know of any coders on their team? Could you pose them a question. If a models scaled ingame, will it destroy/break/ruin the model tangents? I can't see how myself, and have been told by a few people now, from big devs (SD, Epic to name a couple) that its fine to do, and in fact is a needed step. The general rule of thumb in a weapons file is to allow not only a scale offset, but also an X, Y and Z offset for final weapon position tweaking. Rotation is usually something left out however.

Mark Dygert

What rig are you using? CAT has a "rescale" rig feature which is great and you can do pretty much the same thing for Biped but its a bit more manual.

Note this is really helpful if the pivot points for all of your mesh objects and the rig are set to the world 0 0 0 point so they all scale from the same spot, preferably the lowest center point, between the feet. It's also helpful if you reset the transform matrix before skinning.

Scale a CAT rig:
- Go into the skin modifier, advanced parameters, uncheck 'always deform'. This will temporarily unbind the mesh.
- Scale the mesh to the right size, pay attention to how much you scale it, 15%, -34.567%, whatever just pay attention to that number (Right click the scale tool to get accurate numbers)
- Optional: You can reset the scale/transforms in the hierarchy tab but it isn't necessary unless you're hyper anal about things, sometimes it pays off, most times it's just OCD, ha.
- Go Main Menu > Animation > Animation - CAT > Rig resizer
- Add all of your CAT pieces to the list, highlight them all, set your scale factor and click resize.
- Then turn back on 'always deform' in the skin modifier and away you go.

Note: Like Eric said you can bake and save the skin weights and reapply skin but normally you don't need to do that, always deform works fine.

Scale a biped:
- Toggle off Always Deform in the skin modifier.
- Scale the mesh
- Optional: reset transform/scale
- In figure mode adjust the height of the biped and reposition joints if needed.
- Turn on Always Deform.

odium

Thanks Mark, that will hopefully help a huge deal. Thank you indeed.