Yeah, the scale is a bitch. Blizzard models are super tiny, since I'm lazy and don't wanna set up a custom unit in max what I do is I make a 0.1x0.1x0.1 metres box and that would be an aproximate of a CC size.
I just use it as a reference, everything bigger will be BIG.
EDIT: Did the math for a custom unit.
Go to Customize -> Units Setup -> Select Custom -> Leave FL and change the base units to Metres and do FL = 0.01555 metres -> Ok
And now you should just use the custom unit to model. Average human height is around 1.8 (just to give you an idea of the scale) and hydralisk is 2.2 units.
Everything is ok, except animation isnt working... I have model with walk animation, 24 frames... 20-44...
But ingame it wont play, plays only like 2 first frames of 24. And stops...
That's the issue I reported to NiN, I think, what happens is that it doesn't loop the animation. So when walking it displays the animation once but stops after that one time.
You did nothing wrong, I guess, seeing that the model does show the animation.
The reason why there are so many frames is likely due to how the .m3 exporter works on Blizzard's side. It might be converting a standard 30fps animation into 1000fps, perhaps to allow slowing down/ speeding up of animations using the editor without getting choppiness. I can't say if they're actually animating at 1000fps in their source files, but that's what we'll have to deal with for now.
The reason why there are so many frames is likely due to how the .m3 exporter works on Blizzard's side. It might be converting a standard 30fps animation into 1000fps, perhaps to allow slowing down/ speeding up of animations using the editor without getting choppiness. I can't say if they're actually animating at 1000fps in their source files, but that's what we'll have to deal with for now.
yeah same deal with wc3, if you look at their wc3 scenes in the Art Tools sample, they were in 30 fps. I also think, the Star Tools take care of the rescaling as well as conversion of IK to FK.
Blizzard has always used 1000 FPS in their model files, from MDX's to M2's and now with M3's. You don't have to use 1000 FPS, you can import and export at different FPS's. The option is there.
I basically have the updated exporter and the object definitions, however I'm very close to getting the importer working properly with some of the buggier models. I found out the big problem, Blizzard is using mirrored bones that are negatively scaled. This creates big problems with animation and exporting, big big problems. They must be using the dodgy mirror bone tool in 3ds max to make mirror bones which uses negative scales for the mirroring. This is extremely bad for importing/exporting models accurately. Extremely bad. I'm trying to figure out a way to get them in and out properly but it's proving a nightmare. Whoever at blizzard is doing the rigging for these meshes deserves a slap in the face. Anyone with some technical know-how (looking at you darksuit!) who knows how to deal with negative scaling, some of their insights would be highly appreciated. Thanks.
Well, yes, their tools can probbly take care of all this. But hey, I remember art tools. They were strange also... Wc3 modeling and Warcraft 3 editor was actually very very limited...
NiN, so what now ? I have to set FPS to 30 in order to animations work properly ?
Blizzard has always used 1000 FPS in their model files, from MDX's to M2's and now with M3's. You don't have to use 1000 FPS, you can import and export at different FPS's. The option is there. .
as I said, the .max scenes (Art Tool's samples) were in 30 fps, but the art tools exported them as 1000.
Aye BlinkHawk, my tone came off wrong. Wasn't correcting you :)
Big big update for me guys. Animations are now all correct. All of them. Apart from gimbal lock in some of them all animations import correctly. I've tested the bad models, Immortal, Thor, DarkTemplar, all of them are fixed. I've been waiting to get them perfect for so long. Finally :D
There is some error with size. Dunno if its editor problem or exporter. I get random scale when I start game, each time different.
Also, When exporting;
Export animation: FPS:1000
How much it has to be ? Even if I set to 1 FPS, my move speed is too fast, my model is running like he's on steroids. I have 24 frame run animation. But it looks like its 5 frames. I will try leaving it to 1000 now.
BTW, takes 2 seconds to export (1.7 to 1.9).
EDIT: Ok, nothing works, tried everything I know. In exporter, max and GE.
I need to set FPS to 0.01 in order to make it work properly... How I can reduce... hm how was it called in World Editor... animation offset or something like that. Basically, how fast he plays the animation trough specific number of frames. For example, walk animation. Can I set animation speed somewhere in GE, for specific unit, data editor ?
NIN, great job so far. I was playing around with animations and everything seemed to work so far, but I noticed for the walk animation I had done, was having weird results in game. On the right leg part of the mesh is stretching. In 3ds max everything looks solid. Any suggestions?
I'm getting:
Export Failed!
Unknown property: "parent" in undefined
Note that I haven't done anything to the model except, you know, checking the "loop" box in the M3 sequences plug in.
Also, as a but more of a bug report, if when choosing the start time and end you type in the same frame you get something about can't be zero, that's not the bug, the problem is that after that error you can no longer add more animations. Probably because max stops running the script? You just have to close and reload again or reopen your scene.
EDIT:
I think its fixed. Apparently, the last time I exported the animation it created an "m3_anim_help" object that appeared in the bones list and since I was just pressing "select all" it also selected that helper, thus, breaking the plug in.
EDIT 2: Works perfectly, my animation skills don't, though :P
There is some error with size. Dunno if its editor problem or exporter. I get random scale when I start game, each time different.
Also, When exporting;
Export animation: FPS:1000
How much it has to be ? Even if I set to 1 FPS, my move speed is too fast, my model is running like he's on steroids. I have 24 frame run animation. But it looks like its 5 frames. I will try leaving it to 1000 now.
BTW, takes 2 seconds to export (1.7 to 1.9).
EDIT: Ok, nothing works, tried everything I know. In exporter, max and GE. I need to set FPS to 0.01 in order to make it work properly... How I can reduce... hm how was it called in World Editor... animation offset or something like that. Basically, how fast he plays the animation trough specific number of frames. For example, walk animation. Can I set animation speed somewhere in GE, for specific unit, data editor ?
I had the same problem and it seemed to be caused by the scaling i was doing in the actor and the editor was compensating by
increasing the walk animations play speed so i had to go into the actor and set "Animation - Walk Animation Movement Speed" from
2.25 to around 10 or so maybe higher depending on the speed of the model.
Yeah, the exporter is not perfect at exporting animations out of max yet. I've noticed problems with my own custom animations too. Squashed meshes due to bad rotations are common. While the importer is working very well in the animation department, the exporter is still a little way off. However as far as I can see the exporter is able to export all the animations properly that Blizzard uses to animate their M3's. So now it's just fixing up the exporter to be able to handle other animations. If someone doesn't mind supplying me with a very simple .max demonstrating a warped animation or just going through the general process that causes a warped animation that'll be helpful for debugging the problem.
I'll look at some of those errors you brought up. I specifically designed the plugin to update old model animations to include the new data such as looping, frequency, move speed, etc. and will continue to strive for that backward compatibility in future updates. You're correct, a point helper is created and hidden in the scene for storing the animation data you see in the animation ui. Originally I was going to store it in the main mesh, but bones can be imported without the mesh so I needed a separate object to store it all. Selecting anything shouldn't be needed, the exporter scans through all the objects itself, but I'll look into that too. Thanks for the feedback, it's helpful for fixing things I don't catch.
Frames per second works just like it sounds. If you have a 24 frame animation, 1 Frame per second will result in a 24 second animation. I think the FPS export option may be a little bugged so I'll look into it, but I haven't had any major problems with it. The random scale problem I can't comment on. It really sounds like you're doing some weird stuff there tigerija. The exporter is only beta so perhaps start simple and see if you can get a simple animated model into Sc2 to begin with. If you're having trouble getting a simple animated model into Sc2, you can either supply me with the .max or describe to me what you're doing exactly to get such bizzare results so that I can work out how to fix it.
That makes sense, as scaling is designed to affect the speed of the animations. M2's used a similar method in WoW so that when something was scaled up very large its animations ran slower. It would look bizzare if a highly scaled model conducted animations at the same speed as its smaller version. Not sure if that's what you're talking about but it sounds like it.
Great work on the latest exporter. I was doing tests with the Ghost. v1 of the animation export the mesh had really weird weighting issues, but 1b fixed a lot of them up. With my custom mesh applied to the Ghost's animations, I'm having two issues. One is an issue where weighting on an arm is failed to export (is weighted in 3ds Max correctly); but only for a certain animation (run/walk). The other issue I'm encountering which also happens when I skin my mesh to the Marine; is that it will stall on Base Pose instead of running a Stand animation. In both cases, my Base Pose is at frame 2670, which is the standing Base Pose for both of these units. Just wanted to report my findings on this.
Well, as far as I can tell the misrotations and warps can be... either the exporter or the animator :P
Here's a test, I have this totally not complex link model, it's like 300 polys tops and was animated the same way I animated the spider model IskatuMesk showed us earliear. Both animations by me.
Here's how they look in max:
Spider animation:
Link animation:
They both look "fine" in the sense that polys don't screw up. You'd guess that in the end the exporter messed up the complex model (the spider with around 27k polys) but no. Here's how they look in game:
In game spider:
You're better off using the original base pose for each of the meshes, which is set to frame 1 on import by default. There's a relationship between the base frame pose and the way the model is animated. Try setting the base pose to frame 1 and see if it fixes your problems.
As for the weighting, I'm not exactly sure. M3's only support 4 bone weights at maximum so you can only have 4 bone weights. Not too sure on what the problem with the weighting could be.
Cool, I'll use the link model as a good debug model to figure out what's going wrong. I'm seeing a trend that more complicated animations tend to come out looking better than the more simple animations. This could be because complicated animations have more keyframes and the sc2 engine is better at interpolating between more keyframes for rotations. It shouldn't be that way but it's one theory. Anyway cheers for the model it'll be helpful.
There you go. I attached, map, export file, scene.
I made this model and animation just for testing. Now working as supposed to.
BTW if blizz releases some tools for modeling, do you plan to make some kin d of plug ins for it ? Coz I dont know what purpose this tool will have then.
Anyway, good plug in for testing :) .
What do you mean by "tools for modeling?" All Blizzard has ever/will ever release is an exporter plugin, and probably one that only supports an ancient 3ds max version like it did for wc3.
/e In response to your edit - Blizzard doesn't support or update their tools (as demonstrated by their ancient wc3 exporter), and they don't release importers; there's always going to be a high demand for someone who knows his way around this business.
I for one would kill for an m2/mdx importer for 3ds max 2009 right about now.
Yeah, the scale is a bitch. Blizzard models are super tiny, since I'm lazy and don't wanna set up a custom unit in max what I do is I make a 0.1x0.1x0.1 metres box and that would be an aproximate of a CC size.
I just use it as a reference, everything bigger will be BIG.
EDIT: Did the math for a custom unit.
Go to Customize -> Units Setup -> Select Custom -> Leave FL and change the base units to Metres and do FL = 0.01555 metres -> Ok
And now you should just use the custom unit to model. Average human height is around 1.8 (just to give you an idea of the scale) and hydralisk is 2.2 units.
Does bones need to have specific name or ?
Everything is ok, except animation isnt working... I have model with walk animation, 24 frames... 20-44... But ingame it wont play, plays only like 2 first frames of 24. And stops...
@tigerija: Go
That's the issue I reported to NiN, I think, what happens is that it doesn't loop the animation. So when walking it displays the animation once but stops after that one time.
You did nothing wrong, I guess, seeing that the model does show the animation.
Baneling stand animation has 1500 frames...
Extra small models with extra number of frames ? What kind of model makers blizzard has ? Oo
@tigerija
The reason why there are so many frames is likely due to how the .m3 exporter works on Blizzard's side. It might be converting a standard 30fps animation into 1000fps, perhaps to allow slowing down/ speeding up of animations using the editor without getting choppiness. I can't say if they're actually animating at 1000fps in their source files, but that's what we'll have to deal with for now.
yeah same deal with wc3, if you look at their wc3 scenes in the Art Tools sample, they were in 30 fps. I also think, the Star Tools take care of the rescaling as well as conversion of IK to FK.
@BlinkHawk: Go
Blizzard has always used 1000 FPS in their model files, from MDX's to M2's and now with M3's. You don't have to use 1000 FPS, you can import and export at different FPS's. The option is there.
@xcorbo: Go
I basically have the updated exporter and the object definitions, however I'm very close to getting the importer working properly with some of the buggier models. I found out the big problem, Blizzard is using mirrored bones that are negatively scaled. This creates big problems with animation and exporting, big big problems. They must be using the dodgy mirror bone tool in 3ds max to make mirror bones which uses negative scales for the mirroring. This is extremely bad for importing/exporting models accurately. Extremely bad. I'm trying to figure out a way to get them in and out properly but it's proving a nightmare. Whoever at blizzard is doing the rigging for these meshes deserves a slap in the face. Anyone with some technical know-how (looking at you darksuit!) who knows how to deal with negative scaling, some of their insights would be highly appreciated. Thanks.
Haha, I know about that.
Well, yes, their tools can probbly take care of all this. But hey, I remember art tools. They were strange also... Wc3 modeling and Warcraft 3 editor was actually very very limited...
NiN, so what now ? I have to set FPS to 30 in order to animations work properly ?
as I said, the .max scenes (Art Tool's samples) were in 30 fps, but the art tools exported them as 1000.
@BlinkHawk: Go
Aye BlinkHawk, my tone came off wrong. Wasn't correcting you :)
Big big update for me guys. Animations are now all correct. All of them. Apart from gimbal lock in some of them all animations import correctly. I've tested the bad models, Immortal, Thor, DarkTemplar, all of them are fixed. I've been waiting to get them perfect for so long. Finally :D
@xcorbo: Go
I've updated the plugin so the extra animation settings should work properly now xcorbo.
M3 Plugins v1.3
Awesome, animating now works fine. Mostly.
There is some error with size. Dunno if its editor problem or exporter. I get random scale when I start game, each time different.
Also, When exporting;
Export animation: FPS:1000
How much it has to be ? Even if I set to 1 FPS, my move speed is too fast, my model is running like he's on steroids. I have 24 frame run animation. But it looks like its 5 frames. I will try leaving it to 1000 now.
BTW, takes 2 seconds to export (1.7 to 1.9).
EDIT: Ok, nothing works, tried everything I know. In exporter, max and GE. I need to set FPS to 0.01 in order to make it work properly... How I can reduce... hm how was it called in World Editor... animation offset or something like that. Basically, how fast he plays the animation trough specific number of frames. For example, walk animation. Can I set animation speed somewhere in GE, for specific unit, data editor ?
@tigerija: Go
NIN, great job so far. I was playing around with animations and everything seemed to work so far, but I noticed for the walk animation I had done, was having weird results in game. On the right leg part of the mesh is stretching. In 3ds max everything looks solid. Any suggestions?
I'm getting:
Export Failed!
Unknown property: "parent" in undefined
Note that I haven't done anything to the model except, you know, checking the "loop" box in the M3 sequences plug in.
Also, as a but more of a bug report, if when choosing the start time and end you type in the same frame you get something about can't be zero, that's not the bug, the problem is that after that error you can no longer add more animations. Probably because max stops running the script? You just have to close and reload again or reopen your scene.
EDIT:
I think its fixed. Apparently, the last time I exported the animation it created an "m3_anim_help" object that appeared in the bones list and since I was just pressing "select all" it also selected that helper, thus, breaking the plug in.
EDIT 2: Works perfectly, my animation skills don't, though :P
I had the same problem and it seemed to be caused by the scaling i was doing in the actor and the editor was compensating by increasing the walk animations play speed so i had to go into the actor and set "Animation - Walk Animation Movement Speed" from 2.25 to around 10 or so maybe higher depending on the speed of the model.
@ltitans: Go
Yeah, the exporter is not perfect at exporting animations out of max yet. I've noticed problems with my own custom animations too. Squashed meshes due to bad rotations are common. While the importer is working very well in the animation department, the exporter is still a little way off. However as far as I can see the exporter is able to export all the animations properly that Blizzard uses to animate their M3's. So now it's just fixing up the exporter to be able to handle other animations. If someone doesn't mind supplying me with a very simple .max demonstrating a warped animation or just going through the general process that causes a warped animation that'll be helpful for debugging the problem.
@xcorbo: Go
I'll look at some of those errors you brought up. I specifically designed the plugin to update old model animations to include the new data such as looping, frequency, move speed, etc. and will continue to strive for that backward compatibility in future updates. You're correct, a point helper is created and hidden in the scene for storing the animation data you see in the animation ui. Originally I was going to store it in the main mesh, but bones can be imported without the mesh so I needed a separate object to store it all. Selecting anything shouldn't be needed, the exporter scans through all the objects itself, but I'll look into that too. Thanks for the feedback, it's helpful for fixing things I don't catch.
@tigerija: Go
Frames per second works just like it sounds. If you have a 24 frame animation, 1 Frame per second will result in a 24 second animation. I think the FPS export option may be a little bugged so I'll look into it, but I haven't had any major problems with it. The random scale problem I can't comment on. It really sounds like you're doing some weird stuff there tigerija. The exporter is only beta so perhaps start simple and see if you can get a simple animated model into Sc2 to begin with. If you're having trouble getting a simple animated model into Sc2, you can either supply me with the .max or describe to me what you're doing exactly to get such bizzare results so that I can work out how to fix it.
@Ravathor: Go
That makes sense, as scaling is designed to affect the speed of the animations. M2's used a similar method in WoW so that when something was scaled up very large its animations ran slower. It would look bizzare if a highly scaled model conducted animations at the same speed as its smaller version. Not sure if that's what you're talking about but it sounds like it.
Hey Nin,
Great work on the latest exporter. I was doing tests with the Ghost. v1 of the animation export the mesh had really weird weighting issues, but 1b fixed a lot of them up. With my custom mesh applied to the Ghost's animations, I'm having two issues. One is an issue where weighting on an arm is failed to export (is weighted in 3ds Max correctly); but only for a certain animation (run/walk). The other issue I'm encountering which also happens when I skin my mesh to the Marine; is that it will stall on Base Pose instead of running a Stand animation. In both cases, my Base Pose is at frame 2670, which is the standing Base Pose for both of these units. Just wanted to report my findings on this.
Well, as far as I can tell the misrotations and warps can be... either the exporter or the animator :P
Here's a test, I have this totally not complex link model, it's like 300 polys tops and was animated the same way I animated the spider model IskatuMesk showed us earliear. Both animations by me.
Here's how they look in max:
Spider animation:
Link animation:
They both look "fine" in the sense that polys don't screw up. You'd guess that in the end the exporter messed up the complex model (the spider with around 27k polys) but no. Here's how they look in game:
In game spider:
In game Link:
Like you asked, here's the scene that screws up, the link one: Link Removed: http://www.mediafire.com/?mi5zyz2w4tj
@Triceron: Go
You're better off using the original base pose for each of the meshes, which is set to frame 1 on import by default. There's a relationship between the base frame pose and the way the model is animated. Try setting the base pose to frame 1 and see if it fixes your problems.
As for the weighting, I'm not exactly sure. M3's only support 4 bone weights at maximum so you can only have 4 bone weights. Not too sure on what the problem with the weighting could be.
@xcorbo: Go
Cool, I'll use the link model as a good debug model to figure out what's going wrong. I'm seeing a trend that more complicated animations tend to come out looking better than the more simple animations. This could be because complicated animations have more keyframes and the sc2 engine is better at interpolating between more keyframes for rotations. It shouldn't be that way but it's one theory. Anyway cheers for the model it'll be helpful.
There you go. I attached, map, export file, scene. I made this model and animation just for testing. Now working as supposed to.
BTW if blizz releases some tools for modeling, do you plan to make some kin d of plug ins for it ? Coz I dont know what purpose this tool will have then. Anyway, good plug in for testing :) .
EDIT: Link Removed: http://www.mediafire.com/?mn5nih1tmlm
Yes, exporting tools... art tools was(is) exporting tool and plug in.
What do you mean by "tools for modeling?" All Blizzard has ever/will ever release is an exporter plugin, and probably one that only supports an ancient 3ds max version like it did for wc3.
/e In response to your edit - Blizzard doesn't support or update their tools (as demonstrated by their ancient wc3 exporter), and they don't release importers; there's always going to be a high demand for someone who knows his way around this business.
I for one would kill for an m2/mdx importer for 3ds max 2009 right about now.