I just got the demo for Unity and have been having problems ever since I started using it. I have had an animation and 3d modeling program called Animation Master (found at www.hash.com) and have had nothing but problems while trying to use it with Unity.
If I use each program separately I’m impressed by the features of both of them. =) However, if I try to take things I created in Animation Master and use them in the Unity engine I get nothing but roadblocks. =(
My 2 main problems are this.
Animation Master can export .3ds files but Unity seems to have limited support for this file type. Any decals that are on the model simply don’t load into the program. You can work around this but the workaround is very frustrating and will not allow you to import any free models or models not made specifically with Unity in mind.
Apparently animations will not import from .3ds files? I just ran into this hurdle today.
It looks like if I wanted to buy Unity (which I am interested in doing) that I purchased the wrong 3d modeler program to get the job done. So I’m mainly posting to see if anyone on the forums actually uses Animation Master and Unity for game development. If you do can you please tell me what I’m doing wrong? =)
I do not use A:M but I can answer a couple of your questions.
Unity does not support decals in the engine yet. But I am sure you could write a shader to get over that. Most of the time you will be creating your models in your 3D app, UV mapping them, and then applying the shaders inside Unity itself. That’s pretty much the same with any 3D app and Unity and also with a lot of engines. Unity is designed to work with many different software apps (go to: http://unify.bluegillweb.com/scriptwiki/index.php/3dApps for a list of supported 3D apps) so therefore it wont leverage all of the features specific to each app. The good thing is just about any app that can export to .FBX can import into unity.
Nope. The animation (and skinning) data is not present in 3ds files AFAIK. But you have FBX.
I seem to remember someone else here talking about A:M and unity, you might want to do a forum seach if you havent already.
If you are interested in using Animation Master with other programs, you may want to read the below thread. (It’s a short thread on a Cinema 4D site, but may be interesting.)