Best way to rig a 3dsmax-character for use in Unity?

Unity Engine
1

Hi there! Im about to start my journey into the wonderful land of Unity now and have a couple of questions regarding the character animation pipeline from 3ds max to Unity. I know most Unity users may be using Maya, Blender or other apps, since 3ds max isnt too compatible with macs (yet?), but I`ll give it a try anyways :slight_smile:

After years of using a 3d-engine with a 3d-pipeline from 3d-hell, Im really excited about the Unity pipeline. As this is my first ever Unity project, I am really curious how the character pipeline is and I was wondering if somebody has any general tips regarding character export/import into Unity? It cant be as easy as “drag drop”, right?
I`ve read through <http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/HOWTO-ImportObjectMax.html> and I see that the fbx-exporter has a lot of export options, but that not everything is supported by Unity.

My character is a bipedal creature, rigged with biped and the skin modifier. Its really simple, but my main concern is the head. It will have a lot of expressions using the morpher-modifier, so I was wondering how Unity will handle this? Should I rig it using lots of controllable bones instead of morphs? I would guess rigging the head with bones wont be as processor intensive as morphs, but I also guess Unity has a bone-limit, like most other 3d-engines?

I`m also wondering if Unity/Fbx can handle the skin morph modifier, used for “correcting” bulges etc. in meshes affected by the bones?

Well… I guess thats it for now. Hopefully Ill keep this thread active, so other 3ds max people can see the dos and dont`s in the future too!
I know some of these questions may be quite noobish for some people, but I just hate to go back forth, debugging the model/rig for hours without getting the result I want, especially if someone out there has the answers straight away :slight_smile:

Hope somebody out there can help!

All the best,

Roald

2

First of all, take the testet fbx-version 2006.11.1

NOT the current 200900!!!

3

I highly doubt you will be able to use the morph targets I am afraid man, but I’d expect the skin modifier should work fine. In terms of animation its pretty straight forward etc… I seem to remember there being a good guide on how to follow things past the FBX export in one of the platformer tutorials. Either way I was able to have a fully controllable character walking around with blending animations within next to no time!

good luck

4

Why ??

5

I’m seconding the no morphs comment. I tried importing morphs and it didn’t work. Hopefully in an update not too far in the future though.

6

So, am I to assume Unity CANNOT support morph targets? I would like to import a character w/ bones and skin weights… and ‘morph targets’ so that I can make him speak to the player/camera.

Am I reviewing the wrong game engine?

7

At the moment, youll have to use bones for most of your rigging purposes, but hopefully Unity will support morph targets in the near future. There are som scripts that can do some mesh-morphing though, but I havent tested them out myself.

8

Over at http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=16425&highlight=morph+targets

There is some information about morphs. I am still looking into it, but looks promising.
Still looking into layering morph animation atop of other animation so that the character (custom) speaks as he is animated.

Any links or info is appreciated.
Thanks

9

Sorry to dig up an old topic, but this has recently become a big question on our project. Is there any further news regarding Unity’s support for Max biped with skin morph modifiers? In Unity 3?

I’ve seen some of the user-generated solutions, but it doesn’t seem ideal to have separate meshes for every morph (and it sounds like there are some issues with normal maps, which are also character-essential).

Any information would be much appreciated!

10

@hajasal_sk

No support for mesh-morphing yet im afraid. It is still very, very cpu-intensive, so most of the computers today wont be able to handle it well. Im aware of very few game-engines that support mesh-morphing, but its surely something that would be nice to have support for in the near future :slight_smile:

11

Thanks for the information. That’s what I suspected. I share your hope to see it at some point… it would be really great for some game elements, although there are always workarounds. :slight_smile:

12

You can add morphing yourself with a bit of scripting, been messing with it myself and a video can be found of a quick test here http://www.youtube.com/user/Gawaine1066

13

Very interesting!

What’s the CPU hit like? Have you tried it with a rigged character?

14

It works fine with rigged meshes and the CPU hit isnt bad at all, the code only morphs the points it needs to so and only when it needs to do it, and there is no garbage collection on the morph side, the only real cost is whatever Unity gets up to when you ask for vertices and set them again, plus the optional recalc of normals.

15

Spookycat

this sort of thing is exactly what i need, can i get a code example for this please?

good job on figuring this out btw, i cant wait to use it!

16

Sorry to come late to the party.

We just started using Unity (coming from another large engine)
In our previous engine we could import the body (rigged) as one object and then the head as another object with morphs (max)

Yet I read that Unity likes SIngle Skinned Meshes, so I would have to run morph modifier on the whole character, seems that could be fairly intensive.
Right now we are testing Megafiers and so far it calls out fine and the engineers got it to work. But can I do the head separate?

Also were are currently using max2010, but looking into maya 2012/13. Anyone out there with experience on the subject?

Thanks

17

Yes you canskin the head separate. Refer to the character customization demo.