Hello all. Long story short, I have a set of weapon animations that were animated before they were rigged.:\ What are my options for moving those animations to my rigged version of the model? I am using 3dsmax. Thanks in advance.
If by animated without rigging, you mean it was just the mesh moving? If so, then you can take your rig and skin with to the non-rigged version with the animations. Because what you want is the vertex info of the animation which the non-rigged one has. If you can duplicate this, it should preserve it's keyframes.
There are a few ways to do it. 1) Like Eric said export to FBX and import. But you will need to click on the animated meshes and flag them as "bones" for the FBX export/importer to handle them. Select the meshes, go to Animation > Bone Tools and check on "Bone On". If you don't they will probably just import as meshes…
Yeah maybe you could simply use the animated model as your bone rig. If you export that as FBX then reimport, the animated mesh-bones should be converted into standard Max bones, in case you need that for some reason. If you need to fit the animation to a specific rig, then you have to retarget:…
Alright I don't much knowledge about Max but this should work. Make a fresh copy of your weapon in its default position and freeze xform or whatevver you call it. Skin all the parts of the weapon to joints. Simply parent constrain the joints to the animated meshes. Bake the animation on the joints then export.
Sounds like a Reset Xform is needed. Unfortunately this will kill the pivot, screwing up the animation. Here's a Reset Xform script that tries to avoid this problem... http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/clever-reset-xform
It sounds like you scaled the meshes, which is recorded in the transform matrix, which is one reason people use bones instead of meshes. Meshes accidentally get scaled all the time, scale is property that gets propagated to other objects that are linted to it and it will effect the children. It's for this reason that…
none of these things are working. I am to the point where I am about to hire a new animator to redo these. Would anyone be up to checking an example file out to see if you can create a workflow to fix this problem? haha, this is seriously going to make me pull my hair out!
Thanks for all of the responses! I still find myself having some issues with this. Would anyone be interested in making some cash for doing this? IM or Skype ( osirisstudios ) me if you are interested. I'll keep trying it out. The method I had the best luck with, was the dupping the mesh and using it as bones, which I had…