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MSFS20 3dsMax Animation Workflow

Rick Celik

Rick Celik

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257
Country
australia
Hi all,

Just wondering what the general workflow would be in regards to animation and 3dsmax.

I'm stuck on a few issues, I create my character in external software, import into Mixamo to get animations and then back into 3dsmax. However when I combine the mesh of the "human" to make it one single mesh, the animation is lost. Do we need to delete original bones and re rig new bones? Whats the general workflow when it comes to this approach?

Thanks in advance :)
Rick
 
Yes you have to do all your editing first. I had been using a pilot that had individual boots, hands, helmet, head with all of these things being single nodes. After condensing all of them I learned about problems with multi materials and even just using multiple materials on the same single node.

naughty plugin.png


Yep, that is a chin on the pilots left forearm. The animation part worked great, btw. I had been just about to start a support ticket over what I was sure is a defective Babylon plugin when I discovered a workaround for this particular dilemma, so I upgraded my assessment from defective to horribly suboptimal. My workaround had been to map all the unique materials onto a single texture file. It is something 3ds Max can do and now I can too..

Anyways, yes, get your model perfect at Mixamo and then don't change a thing and it might work fine.

 
Thank you for your reply, sorry I'm a little confused. So you do need to re rig your character with new bones and then re unrwap UV the model using a single texture sheet?
 
I usually "start over," I try a technique and if it does not work I discard the build, so each pass into Mixamo is essentially a first time, although I will have dozens of downloads from each attempt at the "perfect pass." Also, I don't rig it, I use Mixamo auto rigger. So let's say the model is set up with two texture files, that seems reasonable. I upload to Mixamo, auto rig, select animation and timings, download, import into 3ds Max to reassign the textures which have already been mapped. Next I delete all keyframes except neck and head, because I wish to remap the Mixamo bones to my control inputs. Then I either pose the model to fit the cockpit, or I simply stand the model next to the aircraft for a "render test" and I build it into the sim to see if my latest texture workaround worked. If it does not work, I start again with the unanimated model, remapping textures to a single document. Then into Mixamo as above. To save texture space and preserve details at the cost of creating extra nodes, I seperated parts from the model into distinct meshes.

Only to find the textures perfectly mapped, but the sunglasses and helmet that I had re separated from the mesh, were the only parts animated. The skinned mesh was frozen! Another weird glitch! This was especially frustrating, because I had separated the two parts adding nodes for the sole purpose of removing texture burden from the pilot model. The sunglasses have a transparency that I already know does not combine well with opaque textures. So I un skinned the helmet and sunglasses I had separated, selected a single head bone and skinned them to that. Now everything seems to be working except the control input animations.
 
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