We are creating a skateboarding game and we have created a bunch of characters and animations in Max.
We have only created animations with the characters riding the board with the left foot forward. We also need to have the exact same manoeuvres available but in the opposite stance, with the right foot forward.
Our animator is telling us there is no easy way to do this, that we have to rebuild ALL the animations again in Max for this opposite stance. This is very frustrating as there are at least 150 hours work in creating the current animations and this will double if there is no shortcut.
So looking for a solution in EITHER Max or Unity here is the challenge:
Unity:
To somehow flip the character and hist animations so they are inverted around his Y axis. We don’t need the character to ACTUALLY have his opposite foot forward, a mirror image would give the same appearance and work just as well.
If I could just import another copy of the anim with the y-scale as ‘-1’. If I change the scale of the transform on static meshes this works and they are inverted but manually changing scale on a skinned mesh with animation doesn’t seem to do anything (except do something weird to the texture mapping). Clearly the vertice locations are stored / calculated in the FBX but I need a way to alter this on the fly…
MAX:
I don’t know a lot about Max but shouldn’t there be a way to use the biped-mirror feature to swap everything the left and right halves of the body are doing?
The other issue is the board itself which is part of the MAX animation and controlled by keyframes on a dummy object. Is there any way to flip the polarity / invert the transform envelopes? Can a batch file or some sort of script be written to do this? ie. if the board moves forward and rotates clockwise in a kickflip it would just need to do the opposite - backwards and counter-clockwise - when the character pose it flipped.
Sorry for posting a Max question on a Unity forum but it’s all part of the same problem…
Any ideas peeps?
Thanks in advance,
Dain