Skinned Mesh XSI Exporting

Not-so-brief .plan covering two things:
*Freelancing
*XSI to DTS Exporting procedure (Skinned Meshes)

Freelancing
I'm in a bit of an empty time as far as work is considered at the moment. I'm going to be doing some lecturing at a University come late January, but until then I'm free to take up tasks on projects people are working on. My skills are based around coding and 3D (check my profile for more information on skills/education/etc) so give me a shout if you are after some extra help - paid work only though please.


XSI to DTS Exporting Procedure (Skinned Meshes)

I've seen people have a fair bit of problems regarding XSI to DTS exporting, specifically with skinned meshes, so I thought I'd do a write up to help people with the process. I'm putting this here so it'll get a more attention then it would have done otherwise, (i.e. not get buried in the forums - 'cos the search isn't exactly stellar :/ ) I'll probably mirror this onto TDN later also. I'm going to have this largely as a step by step to how to rig up a character that is Torque compatible, rather then teach you how to use XSI or how to animate etc.

The main thing here is the use of a shadow rig of nulls instead of XSI bones etc. The exporter wants to use nulls - REMEMBER THIS :D

Firstly, open up XSI and press '2' (will open the animate menu on the left) and then click on Character -> Biped guide and accept the default options. You'll get this funky looking red doohicky.



This is a biped guide, basically it allows you to adjust where your joints etc are going to be on your model and then create a nice rig for it. I'm not going to teach you how to do that, it are easy and I won't insult your intelligence. Right, next let's be lazy and use the default XSI low poly model. Primitive -> Model -> Body - Man. Handily enough it fits perfectly on to the biped guide (almost like that was planned to save time huh? :D)


Now press '8' (to open the scene explorer) and click on Biped_Guide, then go Character -> Rig from Biped Guide. On the new window click on the Shadow Rigs tab. select Null Hierarchy from the options.


You should now have a nice rig setup, with another 'rig' of nulls that shadows it's every movement - cool huh? It's safe to delete to Biped_Guide now, as we don't need it anymore. Make sure you middle click to branch select it before attempting to delete it.

Now open up to the Biped_Null branch until you see 'UpperBody', Drag this up to the scene root and delete the Biped_Null branch.


Now let's quickly bind the character mesh to the null rig (which starts with 'UpperBody') Select the character mesh and then go to Envelope -> Set Envelope. Click yes if it warns about modes. Middle click on the 'UpperBody' in the scene explorer and then right click anywhere.


I'm not going to bother doing anything with envelope weightings; it's not within the scope of what I'm trying to teach you here.

Now its time to setup the scene the way the DTS exporter wants it for export. Create 3 nulls, name them: base01, start01, detail2. Rename the Man to Man2. (Man2 because we have a detail node called detail2 - Please note: I have taken the geometry portion of the Man branch and moved it to the scene root) Setup this hierarchy:


Now let's do a bounds box (simply a cuboid that encompasses everything that is named bounds and is at the scene root)


Now export! Yippee etc.