Cinema 4d animations into unity

Target Platforms Mobile
1

Hi,

I hope someone can help because I’m tearing my hair out here…

I have a simple mesh, rigged with joints in c4d r11. I can’t use bones, because the weight painting tool doesn’t work in c4d1 when I try it with bones. I’m using IK to pose the figure, and am running Bake Objects in the timeline before saving, like all the previous posts have suggested.

I first tried to get my character in with some animations, but all I seemed to get were weird incomplete versions of my animations (the characters legs are from the T-pose, but the arms animate OK).

So, I then tried to get a 1-frame pose into unity, but all I seem to get is the t-posed character.

Letting unity convert the c4d file or manually exporting to FBX gives the same result.

I’ve re-rigged the character about 6 times, trying to use FK instead of IK, etc, etc, but nothing works.

I cant work out if the export/import is broken, or there is something I dont understand. This is the second night I’ve stayed up til 1:30 AM trying to work it out!

George,

Brighouse, UK

2

without bones you won’t get any animation.

Unity only supports skinned bone animation with keyframes, sorry.

3

I thought that too dude, but lots of users have posted that it works with C4D R11 and above:

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/8689/importing-cinema-4d-joints-to-unity

http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=Cinema_4D

And I do get some sort of (broken) animation in, which would suggest that it works but I’m not doing it right…?

Or am I flogging a dead horse here?

4

Hello,

you have to include your bones in your FBX file.

If you bake the animations and do not include your bones, this means you are counting on vertex point animation, which is not supported by Unity (yet).

If you’re using IK anims, sure you have to bake the IKed vertices, though.

Just a simple rule with 3D exporting toward Unity : make everything working only by keyframe animation, as Dreamora said, and you won’t have any problem.

5

Thanks for your help chaps, I think I am getting closer…

I have worked out my main issue - I havent been setting the T-pose on the first keyframe before posing my character.

I hadn’t realised that unity sees the animations as just the translations/rotations/scales of each joint (which I think are being automatically converted to bones properly btw - i did a quick test).

So, because my bones/joints weren’t moving in c4d (the character being totally still in his action pose), there was no translation/rotation.

After the FBX export, effectively the rig was just sitting there outside the mesh (in action pose), not affecting the mesh (still standing in T-pose).

Does this make any sense or does my understanding still seem wrong?

George

6

You nailed it :wink:

Be sure your first anim frame is a T-pose, at the very right place.