Animation setup in 3ds MAX

Unity Engine
1

Hello, I have a number of questions about setting up a character in 3DS MAX for use in a 3rd person Unity (multiplayer) shooter. Overall it will be similar to the bootcamp character setup. I’ve looked around for help, and ill keep looking, but with any luck, the answers arent too complex.

I thought I would find the answers in the user guide, but the “animations” section has a broken link to something that sounds really useful: "You can download an example demo showing pre-setup animated characters here. " (this is the link that seems broken). anyway…

  1. The bootcamp character and the M4 are apparently different meshes in Unity, with the M4 linked to a bone in the characters hand. But when I import the Soldier.FBX (from the demo project “assets” folder) into MAX to see how it works, it imports with the M4 mesh attached. I dont understand this, surely the M4 should be contained in the separate M4.FBX, not the Soldier.FBX? Do I need to include my new gun mesh with my new character mesh or have both in different files?
    (the image below is not related to this question btw, the M4 mesh that appears to be in the soldier.FBX imports at the same scale/location as it appears in unity)

  2. When I import the Soldier.FBX and then also import the M4.FBX, there is a huge scale disparity between the two meshes as shown here:

856260--31930--$shoe_m4.jpg
856260--31930--$shoe_m4.jpg856×362 29.7 KB

can someone explain why this is happening?

  1. There are apparently gazzillions of animations associated with the soldier character in the Assets>>Meshes>>Soldier folder (Aim_Anims, Crouch_Anims, …). Do I need to create all these animations for my new character in MAX, or do I just create a basic “Aim”, Crouch" “Walk” etc and somehow mix them in Unity to create the gazillion new animations.

  2. Are there any good tutorials that I have missed that explain these things? I know how to create simple bone-based animations and split them up with unity but I’ve never tried to set them up for use with a character controller before.

sam

2

Hello, I still havent directly answered any of these questions but I’m finding out a bit more about animation in general in Unity. Is this the best place for this thread or should it be in the Unity Support forum?

Primarily at the moment I am still confused about the amount of animation files I need to create in MAX. I still cant work out exactly which animations were created for the bootcamp character, and which were created by “mixing” different animation layers using scripts. I think the original animations would have been:

walk
run
strafe left
strafe right
crouch
jump
fire
aim
reload m4
reload m203
idle

and then the rest were somehow mixed from these original files and added to the project as animations with names like Soldier@CrouchRunAimBackwards

However, I’ve done a really simple search for “strafe” in the bootcamp scripts and nothing comes up, so I don’t know how Unity is creating/dealing with (for example) the “Soldier@CrouchStrafeRunLeft” animation that is obviously part of the demo. I know there is probably a really simple reason for this, but I’ve been looking all day and I haven’t found it.

I’ve also found someone saying that the bootcamp soldier uses the locomotion system to mix animations, is this true? I plan to start looking at the locomotion system tutorials tomorrow but this feels like I’m missing a few steps. Just to clarify, the general idea is that I stick as closely to the bootcamp demo system as possible so that I can then apply the Photon multiplayer guide (which uses bootcamp) to my own character.