Modo not working well with Mecanim..

Hello Unity Community,

I’m trying to export a model with a simple skeletal joint system, with a smooth (distance) bind, from Modo to unity in the form of .fbx.

I’m running into a slew of problems.

First problem is that when I look at my joints in Unity, they all appear at the center in one big ball, so to the way I fixed this was that I baked the the joints about 120 frames in Modo and that seenmed to have fixed that problem.

Second Problem is when I click auto map in the Avatar configuration, nothing happens. So I manually mapped all the asked joints to my joints. Click Apply and the Avatar icon went from green to red.

Also, while the avatar icon was green, I did not seen any green joints present in the scene tab, as shown in most tutorial videos.

I hope someone else is using Modo that can help me out.

Please and thank you.

Upon countless hours of me throwing my head at this, I found myself with a list of things needed to be done for your mesh to work with Mecanim out of Modo.

1st.
Limit the amount of position, rotation, and scale zero channels. I found that having multiple amounts of these channels in your joints, was causing some awkward joint behavior. i.e. All the joints balling up at the center because the “root” joint had too many position and scale zero channels.

Solution:
Merge down your channels and delete any channels that have “0” in their values.

Solution 2: Recreate your entire skeleton. Cleaning each joint can be very tedious and time consuming and recreating the entire skeleton may end up being the best way to go.

2nd. I was having an issue where most of my avatar would appear Red in the avatar window.
Mecanim will not recognize joints that do not have weights associated with them.

Solution: Add joints at the end of chains so you can delete them after a bind. For example have a Neck–>Head–> (delete)Joint. Then bind your mesh, as a result of this your head joint will receive weighting, and all you need to do is delete the (delete) extra joint you created at the end of your chain.

3rd. This one is iffy, naming your joints with the naming convention of, joint_L, does not get read as well as, Left_Joint.
I call that last one iffy because I have yet to confirm this with multiple skeletons.

I hope this helps anyone else using Modo and exporting .fbx for use with Mecanim in Unity 4.

Please ask any me any questions and I will help as much as I can.