koobas.hobune.stream
Which is the best/most efficient method of rigging in 3DS Max to use in Unity?
Ok, here's the thing.. I've had a few experience in 3DS Max and Unity. Not too advanced stuff, but enough to make myself a complete 3D mini-game. I needed character animation inside my game, so I looked for tutorials on rigging in 3DS Max, and learned some basic stuff about biped rigging. Seemed quite nice and easy enough for some basic use.
I'm thinking of taking things to the next level though, so I'm looking for the best method I should research and become experienced enough to get the most out of the models I'm working with. For example I would like to add facial rigging with facial expressions (lip syncing would be REALLY cool) or add clothes (maybe even swap clothing in-game), edit my model and partially re-use my previous rigging and more...
For the sake of argument, let's assume we're talking about humanoid characters, as I see it that would cover 90% or more of workload. As I've said, I've already use biped rigging, seemed REALLY convenient to use (or edit and use) .bip animations out-of-the-box. I believe I've encountered some other type of animation files, .bvh, but I'm not sure if they were meant to be used in biped rigs, CAT rigs or something else..
So to sum up, I've seen: - Biped rigging - CAT rigging - Generic bone rigging - Some other kind of rigging I've seen in tutorials with some circles and arrows and stuff, not completely sure what they are about to be honest.
Which on of them (or other) would be the most suitable for me to research and master to use inside Unity?
I think the main thing to know is that you're always exporting to an FBX. If a technique gets mangled enough during an FBX export, it's no good for Unity (and probably most games?)
I believed this is the case for all of rigging types.. No?
Some things export to FBX better than others. I think some fancy tricks don't export properly at all.
I'm saying that you could look in a modeling forum for "what animation techiniques export to FBX" or just "what animations work in games" and would get answers from a larger group of people.
I have experience with normal bones, Biped and CAT (and pure helper-based aniamtion for simple stuff like chests that have a lid). I think that CAT is the most flexible and overall easiest way to go. The animation clip system allows you to create all the clips nicely organised and in one time line; When you want to export the model with animations, you just create a new clip that cimbines all the others above it as a collapsed stack, and voilá. The trick here is to have each clip's global strength at zero save for the actual frames where something happens in it; This can be easily done by setting the strength to 0 in frame 0 with a new keyframe, then again to 0 at one frame before the animation clip starts, to 100% at the beginning of the clip, 100% at the end, and 0% again on the frame right after the end.
Biped is good enough for simple stuff but it is effectively dead, meaning support has been abandoned for many years as CAT is the successor. Normal bone rigs are ok too of course but IK etc. has to be made from hand for every new rig, whereas CAT has it included in the human rig presets. But really, the thing that time and again brought me back to CAT is the ability to collapse all animation clips and have one long clip that can then be partinioned inside Unity. Having to work with a single clip the whole time for what will become tens of clips in Unity is very confusing and bound to mess up hours of hard work if keyframes are overridden. The most that can happen in CAT is that one single clip is broken, which can be easily repaired.
Actually, I had managed to merge multiple animation clips to a single long clip for my biped rig, which then split again inside Unity to apply each when needed. There is a system of importing every animation separately and then linking them with some arrows, I'd have to look through my notes to describe it more accurately. For me, the main advantage was that I had found some very extensive libraries for .bip files, helped a lot in the process of applying realistic motion. Some of them I had to edit my self inside 3DS $$anonymous$$ax frame-by-frame to suit my needs, but the result was quite good...
I believe I had made a couple of tests with CAT with the same model, for some reason I didn't have the same success. $$anonymous$$aybe I was doing something wrong, maybe I needed to dig through the whole process a bit more. Don't remember if it had any similar mechanism of importing animation files.
I suppose the best way (or the way providing the most control to be more precise) would be to make a custom bone rig. But in that case I have to make every single animation from scratch, right? I'm not sure if this would look too nice.
What I have little to no information about, is applying face rigging, or clothes to a model. How does this exactly work when importing to Unity? Or it doesn't matter which rigging method I would follow?
Clothes can easily be added by making them share the character's rig:
Shared skeleton and animation state
Face riggind would just be a manner of using Add$$anonymous$$ixingtransform to the head bone which sits at the top of the other face bones.
@Cherno Thanks for the link..
Basically, what I'm trying to do is establish a solid workflow that I can master, one that would allow me in the end (while I enrich my skills along the process) to make more sophisticated animations to use in my games...
As I said, one is clothing (does @Cherno's link have to do only with clothing close to the body? Or also clothing that is not stuck to the body like dresses?), another is facial rigging (potentially with lip syncing), other would be slightly altering body mesh geometry without having to do the rigging from start (I'm working on a project right now, where I will have to edit a model a few times in order to present my character at different ages, it would be really nice if I could skip some the process each time I'm working with a slightly different model and only have to do $$anonymous$$or changes), and even more advanced stuff that I haven't thought of by now.
So if there are any limitations in one of these methods or things are in general more convenient in another it would be nice if I knew it in the beginning...
From Cherno's first post I get the feeling that there are no major differences between CAT and Character Studio (bipeds) and that both could be used as base to add the more advanced stuff I mentioned, I would like to hear more opinions though..
This discussion might be better suited for the forums, I think :)
