Exporting animation with scale from 3dsmax not working as expected.

Andyc

Hi, 

I'm testing out animation exporting from 3ds max to unity and come across some unexpected results. I've basically got a box which scales in size from 0 to 100 over  20 frames. But when I export it to unity and check the animation preview there is no animation. The weird thing is if i take exactly the same box and switch the key frames around so that it scales from 100 to 0 it works and I see the scale down to nothing as expected in the preview window.
Can anyone explain this or provide a solution? I've also tried skinning the box to a dummy and animating that but it doesn't seem to work either. I know unity can handle simple animations like this but I need a solution where I can animate in 3ds max and just export directly to .fbx without having to fiddle with anything inside unity.

Thanks!

Eric Chadwick

Weird.

I bet Max is storing the 100% scale first, then transforming to zero, before starting the animation.

Exporter on the other hand might he tossing the initial state. So it starts at zero, and tries to scale from zero. Which means zero x 100 = zero!

Just a guess though.

danr

Yeah i”ve seen this. I didn’t spend much time looking for a full explanation and solution (though I think Eric’s thinking is probably pretty sound), I think I just scaled from a tiny number like 0.001 instead of 0 and disabled the mesh renderer until the first frame of the anim

Andyc

Argh annoying! I've actually tested with the initial key set to a small value too but didn't work Think it was like 0.1? Guess I'll have to find another solution.

Just out of interest is there any difference between fbx exporters in maya and 3ds max? I'm guessing they should technically both do the same thing.

Eric Chadwick

Why not animate this directly in Unity?

Andyc

Eric Chadwick said:

Why not animate this directly in Unity?

I'm doing some remote work for a programmer friend who's trying out some AR dev and ideally, we would like the asset implementation to be super simple/streamlined. Basically, we would like a situation where I export an fbx, send it to him, then he just drops it into unity and it's exactly as it is in 3ds max. I'm aware that this is quite hard as there's a bunch of other stuff that can be included in a file export but we're just trying to see how close we can get to achieving this workflow.

Eric Chadwick

Ok. Have you tried using a bone, and Skin modifier, animating the bone scale?

Should work better, since the mesh is stored in its "bind" pose, then scaled with keyframes.