I have a character rigged with biped and skin modifier. The character is for a c+c type click and drag game so lots of of charcters will be on screen at once. When my programmer loads the fbx to Unity he sees all the biped components ie foot. hand, toe etc.
Is there a way of exporting the mesh with the animations and and just taking the mesh and not the biped assets?
The game seems to be slowing down with all the extra assets. If we could eliminate the biped it would save so much space. Any help is appreciated
Export selected?
(And remove the biped components from the selection)
Sure i tried that but i will give it another go . Thanx
Nope. When i try to export just the mesh ( even with trajectories collapsed) it says rendering envelopes and then it just hangs. I left it rendering envelopes for about 30 mins but no joy.
in the fbx exporter there should be a check box make sure you select. skins(skin modifiers
and animation
and use export to version FBX200611…or perhaps a earlier version…as you have a choice of what version you export out to…
also you are exporting the biped charectors individually…?
if not you should try doing that as that might be causing the problems…
hmm, i’ve not been able to confirm or deny this, but does unity and the exporter actually handle un-baked envelopes to begin with instead of open envelopes?
normally i bake my vertice weights in my workflow to the individual vertice and not rely on the envelopes on their own. if it helps and you’ve settled on the weighting 100%, if you haven’t baked the verts down, maybe try that? i mean, if it’s hanging at the “converting envelopes” part, maybe cut that bit out and try again?
shrugs
i’m pretty sure weight baking is done by the FBX exporter automatically. Max’s Skin Envelopes aren’t supported in other packages ( even if Maya has got Envelopes too recently )
And to the original poster:
Start to set up your biped using as less parts as possible:
- do you need toe’s and finger’s ?
- if yes - how many of them and how many joints should they really get ?
- How many joints do you use for the spine ?
and so on …
at the end you can achieve proper deformation with a pretty low weight rig
When finished, create a selection set containing the required biped parts and the skin only
Parts you will NOT need to export are all end control objects , biped generates ( but are hidden by default, their names all end with xxxNub, and of course you do’nt need to export the frozen “footsteps” dummy object
In Unity, the best way to improve performance with your rigs is adjusting your bones influence limit to 4 or even 2 bones ( because 4 bones per vertex is usually a directx hardware limit…)
And of course watch your polycounts on the character, that weighs much more than the number of bones in your rig…
you need the biped assets! they’re the bones!
Wow thanks for the responses guys. Im just gonna fire up max and try some of your suggestions. I will let you know how i get on.
OK so tried to bake th weights and still no joy. If i try to export the mesh only it hangs but if i include the biped it exports fine. Tried the fbx settings recommended and stil i get the biped importing in unity. The only thing i can see working is point mesh data but i dont know if unity supports it.
Hi there!
Did you make sure the “Convert Deforming Dummies to Bones” was checked when you exported your model? If it wasn`t, that should hopefully do the trick!
Cheers,
Roald
this is not necessary - biped is detected as bones with the FBX export. Animation->Deformations->Skins has to be enabled though, and of course the Animation export as a whole …
keith patience:
You have to export the mesh AND the biped parts driving the deformations which drive the mesh deformation - NOT ONLY the mesh - is that so un-plausible ?
Unity will need all that joints and bones to drive the same animation and deformations the way biped is doing it in Max…
The bones appear in Unity so what I do is I just place the character into the editor after importing, select the root bone and deactivate it. Problem solved 
you might have to make a prefab out of it to keep them deactivated but it should work with all rigs and it keeps the animations too…
Hey there, I’m the programmer on this particular project. How exactly do I do that?