heya all,
i am importing an playing a maya animation that moves an object across the screen. but i cant seem to import a maya ’ bend modifier’ that is on it. HAs anyone doen this before, or had a problem doing it?
thanks, thanks,
cp
have you told FBX to store deformations?
→ JTBentley
Oh my god! I READ IT :shock:
sorry could not resist! 
I think Maya’s “bend modifier” will not be exported regardless. Unless I’m mistaken, bone deformation is the only mesh deformation that FBX (and thus Unity) will preserve. So things like lattices, blend shapes, sculpt deformers and such must be avoided.
I wish unity will add vertex animation at some point so I could bake any animation I wanted in Maya.
But I will probably wait a long time because the filmbox format does not support it.
Unless Unity writes a mel script that natively export vertex animation to unity…
I’ll keep dreaming until that one day this wish may be fullfilled.
great idea,
really to bad i cant make things bend!
problem with mesh deformation is the significant higher amount of data stored (a skeleton vs each single vertex)
Also its clear that interpolation of 2000 vertices requires a magnitude more processing than the interpolation of 20 bones.
MD2 / MD3 mainly worked because back then, player models didn’t have the poly masses in that people today put in their models (I’ve heard polygon amounts on iphone game models where I was forced to shake my had as thats pure madness what some dream of for putting in)
It only a problem if you use a lot of it, if you were to use it for just one important animation and would apply keyframe reduction I think it will be just fine.
No its not a problem if you use many of them.
On the iphone you don’t have high end math units as on the desktop.
You have the VFP but the VFP is in no way enough to do hundreds to thousands of non-linear interpolations per frame, which you would require in such a scenario.
on the desktop a similar problem exists btw as the animation there is done through shaders for SM2+ cards, which don’t allow you to have hundreds of realtime deforming vertices that are controlled by the shader.
Thats why the skinning approach was developed, reduce the interpolation calculation to a few controlling objects (bones) with combined influence and you reduce the required math calcs by a magnitude and more.
I appreciate the performance concerns, however I would still like to have the choice to have vertex animations. and on the desktop the performance should really not be an major issue with the modern computers.
I have used vertex animation with good results even 5 years ago on much slower systems.
simple fact is that bones also animate vertexes.
I think the mean reason for it’s absence is not performance it’s the complexity to export from maya over film-box to unity.