3DSMAX to Unity 3D

andreinojosa

Hello boys and girls!

After looking a bit on the foruns and found nothing i would like to know if it is possible to bake an animation to a mesh??

Im asking because it would be beautifull to be able to do so in that way when i export the fbx file to the game Engine(Unity) i don´t bring with the mesh the bone polygons.

Anyone?

Obscura

I don't think. Baking animation is used for a different thing.

andreinojosa

Obscura wrote: »

I don't think. Baking animation is used for a different thing.

Hey Obscura, what do you mean that is used for a different thing?

Your don´t think means that there´s no way to bring a mesh to an engine without the bones?

Thank you!

Obscura

If you want complex animation then I don't think there is a way without bones. Showing the animation would help to see if it can be done without bones in Unity.

Eric Chadwick

Yes, there is a way, by exporting the point cache.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/21869

Also, moving this to the Unity section.

andreinojosa

Thank you Obscura and Eric!!

Actually it´s a very simple animation.

Obscura

Eric - This is new to me. I know you can make animation without bones in a modeling package, but I thought you can use anims only with bones, morphs, or shader vertex offset. Why this isn't really used in games? Whats the downside of using this?

Eric Chadwick

It is used, now and then. Waving flags for example, a complex fabric rippling which is difficult to do otherwise. Downside is it's non-interactive (not very usable for clothing for example). Another downside, depends on your target hardware/delivery, is the expense of transmitting a (potentially) large vertex array, and the memory cost. Otherwise quite useful though.

Obscura

Thanks. I think this kind of anim can be done in other ways too in a game engine. The flag example can be easily done with a vertex offset shader. I don't know if it would be any cheaper, but maybe. I thought it is not used in games, because I never met with it yet in an engine. Like even in Unity its an extension.

andreinojosa

So i guess for me is a no work, i was thinking i could use for a walk cycle or somenthing but i guess this plugin is more of a morph animation type.

I guess then i can´t use animations cycles like run, walk etc without bones....

Thank you guys, if you have ideas please let me know.

echofourpapa

You can animate non-skinned objects, if they have keyframes.

Eric Chadwick

Look up "point cache" in the 3ds Max help file, it will show you how to bake any mesh animation into a cache file, which is what that Unity tool needs.

gsokol

Yeah, what Eric said. You can import vertex animation, but you are literally storing the position of every vert for every frame, so the file size gets huge.

I've had to deal with point cache animations at a past company, many of the animation files were a few gigabytes each and frequently caused crashes.

Is there a particular reason you don't want to use bone rig animation?

andreinojosa

gsokol wrote: »

Yeah, what Eric said. You can import vertex animation, but you are literally storing the position of every vert for every frame, so the file size gets huge.

I've had to deal with point cache animations at a past company, many of the animation files were a few gigabytes each and frequently caused crashes.

Is there a particular reason you don't want to use bone rig animation?

Hey man, because im working on a game for mobile, and the enimies are simple but if i add bones in all of them at the end ill get alot of mesh inside the game.

In the end we kind of figured out and i animated inside Unity.

Thanks!

Eric Chadwick

We are doing a mobile game, and we have hundreds of boned characters on screen at the same time. Works great. You just need to be careful with the number of bones per character, try to use as few as possible.

andreinojosa

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

We are doing a mobile game, and we have hundreds of boned characters on screen at the same time. Works great. You just need to be careful with the number of bones per character, try to use as few as possible.

Hey Eric!

For us it was like 6 box bones pe renemy character, so it was like 4*2=8*6=48 tris per character, but the coder said it was quite heavy so.. i kind of said to him to animate into unity. I guess he needs to make a better coding...

Eric Chadwick

Box bones? Do you mean you're using mesh objects for bones? When you export to FBX it converts those to simple bone nodes (no vertices, no triangles, just transforms). So you could use million-triangle meshes for your bones, and it wouldn't matter. What matters is the skinned mesh, and the number of bones assigned to it.

echofourpapa

Are you using CAT for your rig?

echofourpapa

Also, if you can't get the bones to export as non geometry, just remove their mesh components in the Prefab in Unity. The animations only need the transform.

andreinojosa

Hey guys! Im using 3DS MAX CAT for the RIG, not normal objects. Ill suggest this prefab option to the Unity guy, im actually the designer so i don´t have much experience with Unity.

echofourpapa

What's happening is that the CAT rig is being exported as geometry, and not as bones. That is odd. The cool thing about CAT is that you can use any mesh as a bone, but it should still pick them up as non-geometry. are there any modifiers on any of your CAT bones?

andreinojosa

echofourpapa wrote: »

What's happening is that the CAT rig is being exported as geometry, and not as bones. That is odd. The cool thing about CAT is that you can use any mesh as a bone, but it should still pick them up as non-geometry. are there any modifiers on any of your CAT bones?

Hey man, thank you alot for your insight!

Nah, the only modifier is the SKIN. I guessed that it was "normal" to export the mesh and that the bones kind of had to come together to "sustain" the animation into the mesh.

That´s why i created this topic, to find a way to bring the animated mesh without the bones, so by doing this it would be lighter for the gameplay.

This option for non-geometry is at the fbx export option or at the cat?

I tought that bake animation option at the fbx exporter was supposed to do all this trick. =/

But thank you very much for all you guys attention!

echofourpapa

It's lighter with bones if you want animations, as described by others above. Number of bones is important, and also number to bones a vertex can be weighted to(a Unity Quality setting) has an impact on performance.

Was the bone box count a guess? Because I can't get Max to export CAT as anything other than bones, so I don't see how it would be geometry in Unity.

SanderDL

I've had the same problem before. When you use CAT bones Unity sometimes doesn't recognize the bones as bones and they show up as meshes. If this happens just tick "Convert deforming dummies to bones" when exporting als FBX.

andreinojosa

Guys Thank you very much all the attention.

Since my schedule is tight ill do more tests later and bring the results here, but for the moment ill leave as it is.

Perhaps the guy working with the engine may think that the bones are counting as geometry. anyway...

Maybe in October ill have the time to create a case study!