Tuesday, 24 July 2007

Things we've learned (the hard way)

The deadline (3rd of August) is approaching a bit too fast for our liking. We have to admit that we thought this would be easier than it turned out to be. For other people looking into doing XNA stuff we have learned a few things with regards to the loading (and animation) of 3D objects, so here is a short list of the things we've learned so far:
  • When using Maya, all joints of a skeleton/rig needs to have a root node/joint
  • Weights seem to work fine
  • Constraints are a little iffy, but a possible workaround is to skin multiple objects to the same node/joint. This works, even though we get a warning when exporting :)
  • Every time you add such a 3D file to the project, set the content loader to "Skinnedmodel"
  • When exporting, choose "Bake complex animation"
  • Remember to take a peek at the filesize of the .FBX-files once in a while :)
That was that for this post - we hope this is useful for other people than ourselves. We might be back with some more posts as the crunchtime approaches.

Signed,
Svok & Am

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Change the title to the "extremely painful way".
Actually, we had loads of trouble with some skeleton issues. "Reset/freeze skeleton transform" saved our day finally.

svok.

Anonymous said...

Oh, and don't forget that you CANNOT animate on the root node/joint. The solution to this was to create a dummy root joint/node which actually does nothing and just stays there.

And every other joint has to be in the dummy root node's hierarchy.

am.