Hello. My friend is using 3dsmax 2009 for his 3D work and he has a meerkat that he has (quite beautifully, in my opinion) modelled and animated. I’ve seen this animated properly and it looks great to me. He has installed the latest Panda3D 3dsmax plugin (as advised in another post) and I’ve managed to get the model itself with textures into Panda3D once converted to .egg.
This is cool. But when it comes to attaching the animation .egg that he also sent me (from 3dsmax/plugin) the scale of the model is massive it seems, with parts of the body all over the place and its all just crazy. The model alone is fine, but attaching the animation makes it go nuts… Please see video link…
As me and my friend live in different cities, everything is trying to be sorted over email, at one email at a time (due to time), so I want to get back to him with some solid advice to keep the speed of progress up here… Can anyone help? I’ve also linked the animation .egg that was made, as maybe this will be some help too?
Do you get any warnings or errors on the command line?
Also, I believe the max exporter has a bug when you select individual bones to export (I believe you should use “Export entire scene”).
Not that I remember (from last night that is, I’m at work now). I can try again at lunch time. But I don’t remember seeing anything… As you can see from the video, it does animate, but its like the scaling, or something, is totally whack.
Like I say, trying to sorta gather some decent response for my mate Josh … due to delayed emails we’re having to deal with to communicate. Cheers for any feedback!
hm… looks like the classical “center of your skeleton and center of your model are not the same” problem. if the exporter doesnt take this into account one usualy has to make sure both, the skeleton and the model’s center are at the same location, rotatoin,scale.
dunno if this applies to max and your current problem, that’s just guessed from how you described your problem.
That is actually an existing bug. I think I just fixed it.
Go to http://www.mywolf.org/misc/maxegg2009.dlo and download the maxegg2009.dlo. This is the max plugin I just compiled(it also support vertex color,btw), put it in the max2009/plugin directory. Then you are able to use export mesh to export animated model correctly.
How to use:
I changed some part of the UI so right now when you choose to export mesh, you need to choose both model nodes and bone nodes(before you can only choose model nodes). Select what ever model nodes and bone nodes which is related to the chosen model nodes. Do export. This time you will get the correct animation hierarchy.
The problem seems that after max2009 or something, max API changed its structure that the bone nodes are separated with model nodes, it is in the same level as models node but not the children of model node. So when you choose mesh, the exporter can not get the right bone node. So I just add the choice of bone in the exporter.
I guess after this you don’t need to choose the “Entire Scene” to export. It makes some separated/complex model animation available. I will inform pro-rsoft the code changes, so it will be released soon.
wolf24 since you’re working on improving the plugin, would it be possible to finally have 64bit versions of the plugins (max 2008-2010)? The 3D industry and enthusiasts have long ago moved to 64bit versions of max so having the plugins as 32bit only is more than a bit of a drag (since as you probably know, the 32bit plugs are not compatible with 64bit max or vice versa).
My second concern is that the max exporter currently does not support collision geometry like Maya exporter and Chicken do. Would it be possible to do something about this?
Thanks for the current improvements though, they’re certainly improving things
Mindblighter, having 64-bits versions of the plugins would require 64-bits versions of the Max SDK as well - then it’s just a matter of compiling Panda against that.
Hi Mindblighter, pro-rsoft answered your first question.
As for the max geometry collision, I’m currently working on it. I will post it once I finish it.
I added the the geometry collision tag in max exporter, so now you can easily add all kinds of collision tag without changing the egg file.
I also changed the appearance of the exporter, so right now it looks like this: ,
To add collision tag in your egg when you export it, just do:
choose “add collision”.
then choose one collision solid type.
you can choose multiple collide flags.
export.
I also fixed the “texture swapping” bug in the max exporter, so right now if you want to swap texture or use the texture movie function, you don’t need to modify the egg file. I made some changes so that the first channel’s texture can be changed.
Both of them will be released in panda3D 1.7.0 soon.
Hey, that’s pretty cool. It kinda looks you can’t define collision solids per object though, is this true? For example, a sphere for the head, a tube for the upper and lower arm of a character etc.
Unfortunately, I’ve had serious problems running the max exporter (from earlier July CVS builds) with 2010. If anyone else has the opportunity to try it (AFAIK pro-rsoft has run it fine within Virtualbox and I’m the only one who has tested it under a ‘real’ Windows), please report your experiences.
Here’s what kind of problems I’ve had:
In 32bit 2010, the exporter causes 3dsmax to hang no matter what you try to export (even a basic primitive). It does write something in the targeted file.
In 64bit 2010, the exporter causes 3dsmax to crash when exporting animations. Other stuff, including skinning information and bones, appears to export correctly and without crashes.
Also a minor UI improvement suggestion: currently when the exporter is set to exporting the whole scene, the button for adding objects is still active (although it can’t be used). Could you make it so that the button is correctly displayed as disabled when the setting for the full scene is enabled and vice versa?
Furthermore, currently you have to set a Bitmap type in the Bump field to export a Normal Map. I think it would be better if you could properly set Normal Bump in the field (Bitmap then goes under Normal Bump in the map hierarchy). This way you could properly preview it as a Normal Map instead of a regular Bump Map in 3dsmax and it would conform to the standard 3dsmax practice.
If you want a model with different collision solids, you can use “export mesh”, eg.export head with a sphere tag, and arm with a tube tag. Or, more intuitively, just define collision geometry in your game world.eg. create a sphere collision geometry and reparent it to the head…
Sorry, I don’t have max 2010, so I can’t compile it in my computer. So I don’t know why your problems happened.
I already checked the code about the UI part, actually the “ADD” button is already deactivated, that’s why you can’t use it. What you mean is making it grey, right? But they used Custom button, when you deactivate a custom button using "EnableWindow(GetDlgItem(hWnd, IDC_ADD_EXPORT), val);, it doesn’t appear greay. Though for other type of buttons, when you deactivate it, it will turn to grey. Any ideas on how to do that?
Yeah, in classic Windows themes inactive buttons are gray, although in other themes they can be of any color. Unfortunately I have no idea how to implement such things
Well, it’s not a huge issue, although I have to wonder why standard Windows buttons and behaviors were not used. A bigger issue is to get more testers on the plugin. It’s a shame the plugin can’t be distributed separately since it relies on an actual Panda installation.
Oh well, hopefully Panda will move to COLLADA soon and we can forget this whole issue
Same here, I’m getting freaked out of all these exporter problems.
I even tried to develop a game in XNA but when I saw how the coding structures looked like I ran back to panda lol
It’s a spider animated with a physique modifier, but for the skeleton instead of bones it uses linked geometry. For max that’s ok, but for the egg exporter there are no bones in the scene so when I try to export the animation nothing gets exported.
The new plugin will be released with 1.7.0. It might not even work with 1.6.2 as the plugin unfortunately depends on an actual Panda installation and is not a standalone application.
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