Exporting to FBX from MAX (Morpher Issues)
Feb 12th, 2012
I’ve been looking into porting assets to Maya, MotionBuilder, Softimage via FBX. One problematic area I ran into early on was that of the ‘Morpher’ modifier…
To maintain quads, be sure to do the following:
- All mesh objects should be of class ‘Editable_Poly’
- In the exporter options, “Preserve Triangle Orientation” should not be checked.
Morpher compatibility…
- It seems that only the top most MORPHER modifier is exported with FBX. The others are ignored.Furthermore,it seems that morpher modifiers are limited to 100 channels. While you can set channels above this in mxs, the results are not as intended and I’ve only seen one channel above 100 work and it seems to be any index over 100.
- All morph targets need to exist in the scene as objects and targeted via the MORPHER ui. Failing to do this will result in the channel names being truncated to the first letter of their name. IE “Jaw_open” and “Jaw_back” both become “J” and “J” respectively. A script below helps address this by extracting and re-targeting morph target objects embedded in the MORPHER modifier.
Facial Animation R&D
Jan 19th, 2012
For years now, we’ve been using morph target based facial animation on our games at Volition. At the start of a new project there is a typical “bones vs. morphs” debate that occurs and we’ve always stuck to what we know. In the past, I’ve been on the recipient side of reviewing the results of debates and proposals. On a recent project, I had the opportunity to dive into this topic more hands on and I was quite surprised to hear myself recommending a ‘bones based’ approach…
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NOTE: Normal map is inverted and wrinkle maps are not setup or shown here. |
Head (work-in-progress) model courtesy of Ben Eoff. |
Performance Opt. for 3ds Max 2012 – Disable Hidden Skin & Morpher
Jan 13th, 2012
It seems the 3ds Max 2012 is still processing Skin and Morpher modifiers when their geometry objects are hidden. So, this quick snippet just toggles the modifiers onoff across the entire scene based on their objects’ visibility.
mapped fn toggleSkinMorph_basedOnVis obj = (
modA = obj.modifiers
for m in modA do (
if classof m == Skin or classOf m == Morpher then (
m.enabled = not obj.isHidden
)
)
)
toggleSkinMorph_basedOnVis $geometry
SR3 Screenshots…
Sep 4th, 2011
It is becoming increasing difficult to “capture” the essence of a game that is in motion in a single screenshot. We did make use of various techniques to compose screenshots that were representative of the player’s experience. Everything was captured from the game, but frequently composited or at a minimum balanced in Photoshop. Here is a collection of screens that I contributed using such techniques for SRTT (think of them as video game photography):
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SR3 Jobsheet – Cutscene Lighting Pass
Aug 5th, 2011
Here is an example jobsheet that I made for the Lighting Pass on a SR3 Cutscene:
High level documentation and examples helped outline the style we were aiming for. This document provided specifics and immediate goals including which colorscript (separate reference) to refer to .
SR3 Cinematics Progressed per the following:
- script
- storyboard
- animatic
- animation pass
- facial pass
- lighting & fx pass
