XForm Screwed me

Smirnoffka

Hey all,

I was just wondering if I could salvage my 4+ hours of animation or not. You see, what happened is...

I made my mesh, reset the Xforms before making a rig. Because the legs were symmetrical, I mirrored the bones from one leg to the other. This was the crucial error I think.

So, anyway, I did all my animating, and got to export it to ogre, and it turns out that this leg just fucks everything up.

Is there anyway that I can like reset the xform of these 4 bones without changing anything, or is it a lost cause and I should just make another rig and redo all the animations.

Cheers,

Edit: I should mention that just resetting the xform of these bones via the modifier just makes a big mess... Even with plugin found here www.paulneale.com/scripts/resetXform/PEN_resetXform.htm

Eric Chadwick

Never never never Reset Xform on bones. All they are is little pivots, pointing a particular direction. Reset Xform resets that orientation. This obviously totally destroys your animation.

There are a couple tricks to fix mirrored bones. Do you have a version of the file before you put the Reset Xform on the bones?

byder

So you reset Xform on the rig?! I normally only reset Xform on meshes.
Anyway, the resetting the Xform should put an Xform modifier on the stack... try deleting that, otherwise from my experience resetting Xform is an none undoable action?! You need to roll back to an older save file!!
Dunno if any of this helps?!

Mark Dygert

I'm pretty sure that once you apply the Xform modifier it clears the data and its not coming back even if you remove the modifier... It won't come back if you try and "undo" the reset Xform.

I suspect you used Max's Mirror tool like you would on geometry? If so that's the wrong tool to use on bones. Bones have a special mirror bone tool found in Animation > Bone Tools > Mirror.

Smirnoffka

Yeah, I have a version that has no xform resets at all, and one where its only on the mesh. I also used maxes mirror tool on the bones, not the animation. So, am I screwed?

Bal

On a site note, is there a valid reason why 3dsmax can't undo a reset xform? Maya has no problem undoing freeze transformation, don't really see how that's different...

Eric Chadwick

There is a method to fix mirrored bones, I'll look it up for you.

I don't know why Max does the Reset Xform the way it does, like Vig says neither undo nor removing the modifier will remove the reset.

Smirnoffka

Yeah, I remember it doing that, thats why I saved a few times before I had done any resetting.

Cheers for that.

Eric Chadwick

Here's the old method of resetting incorrectly-mirrored bones. Not sure if it still works, good luck.

1. Bake all the vertex weights in Skin, save the weights, delete the Skin modifier.
2. Turn off the bone properties for all the bones (in bone tools).
3. Select the top bone in the chain.
4. Reset scale (in bone tools), do this individually for each bone in the chain.
5. Turn bone properties back on (the bones will flip the other direction).
6. Hit realign. They should now be facing the right way. (the end nub will not, you can rotate that by hand).
7. Apply a new Skin modifier, load the saved weights.

Eric Chadwick

Oh, found some more old info...

Make sure to check your bones before creating animation, since any animation that exists on the negative-scaled bones will need to be re-created once the bones are reset to a positive scale.

To check if any bones have non-uniform scale, select a bone and choose the icon Select and Non-Uniform Scale, then display the Transform Type-In dialog... all the Absolute:Local values should be positive. An alternative method is to use a tool like the FBX exporter which will pop up an error dialog listing all bones that have non-uniform and/or negative scale.

Smirnoffka

Hey, thanks for the help. I tried it and the animations were fucked, though the rig then became good.

I redid all the animations, but it took me like half the time, which is a good thing. Anyway, thanks for the help, and I sure as hell won't be making that mistake nextime!

Cheers!