Orientation off when loading default animations
by Karen McKenna · in Artist Corner · 11/05/2006 (12:17 am) · 6 replies
I hope I'm not missing something obvious here (or maybe I do, if that means it'd be easy to fix...), but I'm kind of stumped. I'm trying to get a model I've created in Maya 7 to work with the default animations for the orc included in the Maya2DTS filepack (as those should have the underscores in the joint names that are required by Maya). I created a rig to match those animations and I believe all of the correct nodes are included and everything is named properly. The model exports to DTS without any errors, and when I first load it up in ShowTool Pro, it seems to appear normally:
Okay, so then I load the DSQ files, and that's where things go horribly, horribly wrong.
That's the forward walk animation in that screenshot, but it's pretty much the same (often even more distorted) for most animations, unless it's just something like the head movement, which doesn't necessarily look great, but still retains the original orientation of the model. Now, I take it that it's a good sign that it's letting me load the animations at all, but something is obviously very wrong here. Something weird is going on with the axis, but I can't tell what's causing it. When I first exported the DTS file, I had the Y axis as up in Maya, but after seeing these results, I thought that maybe that was the problem. So I went back and set the Z axis as up, reoriented the model, and exported again, but that didn't seem to make a difference. I'm not really sure what could be causing it to flip like that. Also, it appears that the body is twisting around at the Bip01_Spine2 joint, and I can't figure out why it would be doing that. I'm not seeing anything strange there in the original Maya file.
Any ideas what I could be doing wrong? Sorry if I'm missing something dumb, but any help with troubleshooting this issue would be very much appreciated. :)
Edit: It's 3am, and I can't get images to load. Whee. :)
Okay, so then I load the DSQ files, and that's where things go horribly, horribly wrong.
That's the forward walk animation in that screenshot, but it's pretty much the same (often even more distorted) for most animations, unless it's just something like the head movement, which doesn't necessarily look great, but still retains the original orientation of the model. Now, I take it that it's a good sign that it's letting me load the animations at all, but something is obviously very wrong here. Something weird is going on with the axis, but I can't tell what's causing it. When I first exported the DTS file, I had the Y axis as up in Maya, but after seeing these results, I thought that maybe that was the problem. So I went back and set the Z axis as up, reoriented the model, and exported again, but that didn't seem to make a difference. I'm not really sure what could be causing it to flip like that. Also, it appears that the body is twisting around at the Bip01_Spine2 joint, and I can't figure out why it would be doing that. I'm not seeing anything strange there in the original Maya file.
Any ideas what I could be doing wrong? Sorry if I'm missing something dumb, but any help with troubleshooting this issue would be very much appreciated. :)
Edit: It's 3am, and I can't get images to load. Whee. :)
About the author
#2
Also, what should the bind pose be for these default animations? I'm just going with a pretty straight T-pose as seen above, but I'm not sure if that's how the default animations are set up, or if that even matters.
11/07/2006 (12:54 pm)
Thanks for the response, Mark. I recreated the skeleton. As far as I could tell, only the blue box guy was included in the Maya2DTS filepack in a Maya file format, so I used that skeleton as a guide, though because he was positioned in a way that didn't resemble any kind of traditional bind pose, I figured it might be a lot neater to just recreated the skeleton than to try to straighten that one out. But I suppose I could have messed something up in the hierarchy, so I'll have to go back again and triple check everything. Also, what should the bind pose be for these default animations? I'm just going with a pretty straight T-pose as seen above, but I'm not sure if that's how the default animations are set up, or if that even matters.
#3
11/08/2006 (5:07 am)
Depends if it were made with Character Studio's Biped structure or Bones. I think the 'traditional' Biped Skinning pose[FigureMode?] is arms at sides...can't remember, this was on a very old version of Max.
#4
Fredrik S
11/11/2006 (10:14 am)
Check the bounding box. Make sure the Y is pointing forward and Z is up on that.Fredrik S
#5
11/11/2006 (4:46 pm)
Yep, Y is forward and Z is up. Also, I noticed if I take the BlueGuy.ma file that came with the Maya2DTS filepack and export that to DTS, I'm coming up with the same problem with the up axis flipping. Now, that file was using Maya's default Y up, but I changed it to Z up and rotated the model to reflect that, but when I load the animations, the same thing still happens. Has anyone worked with this filepack before and had any success using the animations it comes with?
#6
11/11/2006 (5:48 pm)
Just noting that the animations that only affect the head and arms will play without flipping the model. But anything with the legs or torso moving seem to flip it. 
Torque Owner Mark Pilkington
If you just recreated the bones and renamed them to what they are supposed to be try looking at the orc's original hiarachy and match that, I've had problems in the past with other engines about this.