3Ds Max - Merge or Combine animations?

TorQue[MoD]

Hey all,
Using max 2017, I have a character mesh and I'm trying to make a transition animation from a flying loop into the idle pose. I was hoping that I'd be able to simply drop a single frame of the Idle pose into the timeline 10 frames after the flying loop ends and then it would blend automatically (with some clean up of course). Unfortunately since the two animations are separate I have no way to do that. I tried opening the Idle pose and selecting all of the bones then saving the animation to .xaf and then loading it back into my flying loop scene but this didn't work. First time it just made one leg spin in a 360 rotation and the second time (after I checked off every option in the save) it just twitched every bone slightly. I also tried importing the FBX and using update animation but this just dropped out my flying loop entirely.

Searching on google, everyone seems to swear the Save animation option is how you do this but I can't get it to work. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Mark Dygert

You'll want to use Motion Mixer which was a tool originally created for biped but was later expanded to work with all rigs, albeit a little unstable and prone to corruption, you've been warned.

OR...

Abandon 3dsmax all together and use Motion Builder. Maya has Motion Builder built into Maya so if you have access to Maya, you can get it done there as well.

TorQue[MoD]

Thanks Mark! I actually decided to simply blend from the flying to idle in-engine as it was a lot easier :P But I'll definitely look into Motion Mixer for the future. I'm pretty sure I've used it with Biped before but I wasn't aware it would work with bones. Thanks for reminding me about it! You're more reliable than Google! ha ha

monster

You can use Select Time, Copy Time, and Paste Time in the Dope Sheet. Or look on ScriptSpot for a pose saving script.

TorQue[MoD]

Mark Dygert said:

...originally created for biped but was later expanded to work with all rigs...

So how do you open Motion Mixer on a non biped character rig? Cause it's not an option in the animation panel if I've got a bone selected.

TorQue[MoD]

Well I'll be damned. I just figured out how to properly save and load an animation. For some reason I was under the impression that I had to add in the empty space at the beginning of the animation so it had room for the other one and this was causing major issues but apparently you can just save out the animation as normal and then when you load it into the file you want to merge it with, it will just load in to the current frame. That was a lot easier than I was making it :P 

Coincidentally I also discovered that you can use UE4 to combine animations by creating an animation montage and then recording the playback as a new animation file but that's unnecessary if you just want to combine two fbx animations for the same rig. The cool thing about doing it in UE4 is that it adds in animation blending between the files.
For those interested, I created a quick tutorial on how to do this since it's a free program and in my eyes, a lot easier to use than Motion Builder. 
https://youtu.be/79MlEu-WWgI