max animation into maya

gavku

ok... we have a bunch of anims for a character that were done in Max. These were done for the PC version of the game and we'd like to use them on the DS version. Now,.. the max files contain just animated mesh...ie: its just the character limbs moving etc with no rig in there. We need to get this animation into Maya...and if possible apply animation to a rig in Maya. Have gone through a few scenarios like fooling with point cache...as well as building a rig in Maya, bringing that into Max, then somehow transferring the animation to the rig...with no success. Any suggestions would be appreciated, as there's a crapload of anims....

Eric Chadwick

Ouch. No access to the source skinned files? Good luck!

You'll need some serious scripting mojo, if you want to extract hierarchical bone rotations from raw vertex motion.

You might be able to rig something up where each bone is constrained to a nearby vertex or two or three, so the bones then follow the mesh as it moves. But it's going to be messy nonethelsss.

gavku

Yeah no access to the skinned files:(...What they actually did was cut up the model into pieces and animated these as the bones...

Eric Chadwick

Oh, then this might be do-able. Are the meshes still animated like bones, using rotations? Or are the original mesh pieces baked into pure vertex position animation?

If you can get the latter, you could just use those meshes as your bones, skinning a welded version of the charter to them. Then export to FBX, which _should_ recognize the meshes as bones and convert them properly.

Eric Chadwick

Hey, I just saw this while looking for something else. Might help you...
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/convert-linked-object-to-skin-ms

Shawner

You could always write a script to export an .obj or some such per frame and import per frame into Maya. Or just do it manually if the mojo isn't avaliable.