Bringing Maya FBX Animation into Max

8-Bit

Hi guys, I have a bit of a problem when trying to export an animation from Maya and import it into 3ds Max. I've searched high and low and asked several people about it already but nobody has had the answer yet. I have virtually no experience in Max so it could be a very simple setting adjustment.

I'm using the .fbx file format. These are the settings I have



When I import the file into Max the control handles are still key'd out and animating like in Maya, but the joints are no longer constrained to the controls so the character doesn't actually move.

Does anybody know what I'm doing wrong?
Thank you for any incite you may have.

Froyok

I don't see a picture, but I guess you have already checked the "constraint" option in the FBX export settings ?

8-Bit

No picture? well I'll just list what is checked off then

Geometry :

Smoothing groups

Smooth mesh


Animation:

Animation


Bake Animation:

Bake Animation

Start/ 0

End/ 96

Step/ 1


Deformed Models:

Skins

Blend Shapes


Constraints:

Constraints

FBIK Definitions


I'm truly a noob when it comes to FBX and Max..

monster

In my experience constraints don't transfer when going from Max to Maya, only to MotionBuilder. However, you are baking the motion so it should sill import correctly.

You could try baking the animation in Maya to the skeleton, and re-exporting to FBX again.

8-Bit

Monster, how do I do that? I'm not really that well versed in dealing with animation. Is what your suggesting basically going to key out the movement of the joints?

Warheart

You could bake the motion on export with FBX to save you baking it in the scene.

To do this set the "Bake Animation" setting to true, set the start and end to match the desired time range (this gets set based on the time slider by default) set step to 1 and also set "Resample Animation" to true.

poopipe

what Warheart says works

There will almost certainly be bone flipping caused by quaternion to euler conversion.

Maya offers an option to retain quaternion interpolation at export but max doesn't seem to like importing it.

You could try importing the skeletons, switching all rotation controllers to TCB and then re-importing the animation (use the update only option in the importer dialog for this)

chances are you're going to have to do some cleanup whatever happens though

8-Bit

I got it working by animating the joints themselves, however the arm is flickering as it moves. I gave your method a shot Warheart but it didn't quite work. Not sure what the issue is with the file.

What I ended up doing to get it to the point it's at now is I exported the controls and the joints separate and gave the joints their own keyframes... Doesn't exactly work like the maya file, and doesn't really show my original keyframes that well but the motion is there. I guess the only problem I'm still faced with is the arm flickering.. kind of strange.

poopipe

the flickering is probably the joint flipping I mentioned - you'll see spikes in rotation curves for the joints in question.

theres a few scripts floating about that reckon they fix it - try swithcing to TCB controlers and reimporting onto the same skeleton though - you might get lucky

8-Bit

Well it's not too bad at this point, but it's still jerking the arms around quite a bit. I'm totally new to Max and that's the biggest wall I'm hitting right now. I'm having difficulty even selecting joints or figuring out how to adjust key frames at all. Does Max have something similar to Maya's graph editor?

poopipe

yep - select something, right click and choose curve editor


basically, it's the same as Maya only you have to forget all the stupid non-windows control methods and use sensible ones instead

press H to get the equivalent of the outliner (very slow and modal) or use the layer manager window to do selection (non-modal and fast)

8-Bit

Thanks a lot Pipe!

That's pretty simple to work with. I've already found where a few of the keys went crazy. Hopefully cleaning up the graph will fix it