Maya to UDK FBX Animation import Difficulty: Requesting help

Brian "Panda" Choi

Hi Polycount:

I'm trying to learn the ins and outs of the UDK Art pipeline, including animation. I am getting stuck at importing animations, to say nothing of the variety of rigs I'm getting from various team members.

I've been going through eat3D's tutorials, but I'm still either getting errors on import/export. I was wondering if I could spend an hour real quick with someone on Google Hangout to run me through the basics of animation (Skeletal Mesh) import into UDK as well as any rigging questions?

beefaroni

If you haven't looked at it already, Epic Games has their own set of brief tutorials for UDK. This one covers "FBX Animation Pipeline (Exporting Animations from 3D Apps)".

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/FBXAnimationPipeline.html

Brian "Panda" Choi

Surprisingly, this tutorial has helped me in solving my problems as opposed to EPIC's or eat3D's. Just word by word followed those instructions, and now it's working.

Now I'm getting an issue where, while the character will crouch fine relative to the floor in Maya, but exporting, the UDK animation, the "floor" for the character moves instead.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Bumping this due to a slight time emergency.

Is there ANYONE out their who can Google Hangout with me to help me tackle this issue in an hour or so?

alfalfasprossen

the only joint that has translate-information by default is the absolute root joint. I suppose you are moving another joint for the crouching n stuff.
you can set which joint has translate-animation in the anim set tab or somewhere inside the animtaion editor in UDK. you will have to recompress (see the menu bar) the animations afterwards to make the change happen in game.

TrevorJ

Hey, JadeEyePanda. I think alfalfasprossen is right. Unreal rigs always have their "root" bone at world 0,0,0. This joint never moves. If you look at the two different anim sets in the UDK, "K_Anim_Human_BaseMale" and "K_AnimHuman_AimOffset" you can see that the BaseMale one has a bunch of bones set for the "use translation bone names" while the other has none but has the "anim Rotation only" checkbox unchecked. I would look at those to see if they can help you with your problem.

Brian "Panda" Choi

So, I got an updted Rig from the guy, and it has the Root Bone again and everything, AND the outliner seems to be in proper shape.

BUT, the only way I can get the animation to work (same issue as above with the crouching test) is that I have to uncheck the Anim Rotation Only (what does that do?) and recompress the animation in the Editor itself.

For some reason, just straight up importing the FBX file into UDK, the animation would run, but the feet won't stick to the floor. Functionally, after the recompression, it works fine, I haven't had this issue with a friend's (who's currently profesionally working) rig that he gave to me for practice.

What do I need to do to avoid having to recompress?

alfalfasprossen

you won't need to recompress future animations for the same skeleton.
AnimRotationOnly means to throw away the translate-information of the bone. This is useful to reduce the memory footprint of animations, as most bones in a human skeleton only rotate.

In your current rig there is propably a joint at the world-origin, which is never moved, and instead the hip-joint is moved. For the rig you got for testing, this might be different. By default the root joint has animRotationOnly unchecked. If the joint you need to actually use translation is another, you need to set that by hand. Recompression needs only be applied when your skeleton changes after you already imported animations (or if you change the compression settings of course)