I’m having a little trouble importing skinned meshes from Cheetah. Like a lot of other folks, I’m working on a character creation system. To set it up, I have a number of different meshes skinned to the same skeleton in my Cheetah file. The idea is that by skinning various meshes to the same skeleton, I’ll be able to swap out meshes for the upper body, lower body, etc and have them all animate correctly regardless of which mesh is active.
The trouble is that when I import this file into Unity and load it into a scene, I seem to lose a bunch of random polygons.
This only happens when I have multiple skinned meshes in the Cheetah file. With only one skinned mesh, everything imports correctly.
I attached some screenshots to show the problem (the horrible colors are for testing). Has anyone seen this before? Is this a bug, or am I doing something incorrectly?
One thing I tried was creating different files with each mesh skinned in its own file. The problem there was that when there is only one skinned mesh in the 3d program, Unity puts the skinned mesh renderer on the root bone instead of the mesh. The only way around this is to create a dummy skinned mesh in the file, which creates the same problem.
Tri’s on those locations are inverted. It still has the color, but if you “zoom” into the arms, you should see the color on the “inside” of the arm. This reminds me of my characters all twisted from Maya 2008 into Unity via its FBX conversion. Very bad mojo. Anyway only way to find out is to invert the texture so it is on the back side of the mesh Tri’s, if the view is opposite what you see now, then there is your answer.
Sorry for the late response. I have been out of town the last few days.
@zumwalt – It’s definitely not an inverted normal problem. I checked on that when I first noticed the issue. “Flying” inside doesn’t reveal the hidden faces. Just to be sure, I flipped the mesh normals and saw the same missing pieces. I also applied a shader with backface culling turned off, and those polys are still missing.
@Targos – thanks for the offer. I’ll send you a message with a link.
So I opened your file, and theres one skeleton. All the pieces are bound to it, and I dont have the missing polygon issue at all…
I duplicated the shirt and ran a crumple action on it to make it different and in unity I can switch one or the other off (Change shirt) as I believe you want to do…
So at this point Im wondering if you are developing on a mac mini or early macbook and that it might be a gfx issue? It looks good to me, although you only get one skeleton rather than a bunch but you seem to have achieved what you set out to do…
If I’ve missed something please let me know, but I’d recommend bugreporting this with a link to this thread and the package, as I have a feeling Aras might be keen on taking a look if its a rendering issue…Bugreport it regardless as we are getting conflicting results.
Not only is it working fine but I think you’ve cracked the customisable avatar thing. Well done!
Wow, well I’m glad it’s working for you. At least this means my method isn’t the problem. I’ll submit a bug report and see what happens.
For what it’s worth, I’m running a late-model 24-inch iMac, 3GHz Core 2 Duo that I bought earlier this year. Graphics chip is the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS.
Thanks for the help. I’ll post here when I hear back on the bug report.
Also make sure you have the latest build of Cheetah (4.6.3 I think) and if that doesnt help, send the file to Martin. Point him to this thread. I think hes got an earlier imac.
I was running Cheetah 4.6.2. I upgraded to 4.6.3, and the problem is fixed! Must have been a bug in the way Cheetah was setting up its skinned meshes. This is fantastic! Thanks for walking through it with me, Targos.
