Envelopes: Issues With Bones In Max2Egg Converter

Pipeline
1

Hi, everybody!

I’m very newbie with Panda and I’m having an issue with the Max2Egg converter (note: I’m using 3DMax2009). I’m trying to associate vertex to bones with the Envelope tool, but when I checked the animation in Panda, I didn’t get the mesh deformations.

I read in the manual that the main limitation of this converter is “the Max exporter understands only bone-based animation. In other words, all animation must be done by moving bones around. If you move anything else, the Max exporter may not notice!”. So, if I move vertex with bone influence, the only thing the exporter will understand is the bone animation and the vertex animation will be ignored? If it’s so, is there any other methods to make vertex animation?

Thanks in advice!

2

I’m using 2009 too and I haven’t had any luck exporting the animations with deformations. As a workaround I use Pandasoft’s (not related to this Panda! :laughing: ) .X exporter available from http://www.andytather.co.uk/Panda/directxmax_downloads.aspx. Panda3D can load the .x files directly or you can convert them to .egg with x2egg (in cmd ‘x2egg myfile.x myfile.egg’)

I’d also recommend checking out the bugthread for a solution for the caching problem I encountered with (.X) models https://discourse.panda3d.org/viewtopic.php?t=4955

3

Thanks for the help, Mindblighter! I’ll try this method. ^^

4

The documentation claims that skinned animations will work (i e, move the bone, the vertices move). What doesn’t work are meshes parented to bones (why?) and blend shapes (the Max “Morpher” modifier).
Unfortunately, there seems to be some weirdness with the skeleton exporter, such that the hierarchy for the same mesh is not the same when exporting as geometry vs exporting as animation. I have posted a more detailed analysis (with the output of dumping the egg file hierarchies) in another thread.

5

Today in the IRC channel we found out that it is possible to export bone animations. Here are the requirements:

1. You have to export 'Model' and 'Anim' seperately
2. You have to use the option 'Export Entire Scene'

There is one limitation caused by the latter option however: if you have other models (such as planes with reference pictures), they will be exported too. While this isn’t an ideal solution, it is better than nothing and hopefully it will do until a fixed plugin becomes available. Lastly, all credit goes to b1s for the initial discovery :smiley:

EDIT: I included that tip in the manual entry for 3dsmax exporting with the map type equivalents between 3dsmax and eggs.

6

I already tried exporting the entire scene, and that worked even less than exporting animation separately.

7

I tried it myself today and it worked perfectly :unamused: