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Max 9 DTS Exporting Issue

by Eugene Schaeffer · in Torque Game Engine · 01/13/2008 (9:48 pm) · 3 replies

I have been attempting to export a model for Torque from Max 9 using max2dtsExporterPro. The model is set up to have the main body as an object, skinned to a biped, with a separate head skinned to the same biped. In order to get certain cloth objects on the model to work, I have attached bone chains to the hips of the biped, six in total, and used splines (also attached to the hips) to guide the bone chains with SplineIK Solvers. There is a hat object which is position constrained to the head and hand and switches between them throughout the animation, which seems to export fine, and a parented object to the hand of the model, also which seems to export fine.

The head and body meshes, when exported, give an error: "Assertion failed on skin objectSkin "character_head". I'm not entirely sure what seems to be causing this, and I haven't found any documentation on how the exporter really works, so any help anyone could offer would be sincerely appreciated. If you need any more information, please let me know. It's very important that I figure this out.
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Torque 3D Owner Adam
Adam deGrandis
#1
01/14/2008 (7:24 pm)
You can only have one skinned mesh in a scene. You can have more if you make changes to the engine.

Why do you have the head and the body as separate objects?

Torque Owner Eugene Schaeffer
#2
01/14/2008 (10:24 pm)
The separate head is mainly due to modeling experimentation, but primarily due to simplification of morph target work flow. In the end it doesn't matter in the long run, since it's the difference between hiding 1000 polygon models, or 4000 polygon models in max, but the result will be the same. I will have to try connecting the two. Currently we have the body exporting as an editable mesh, but haven't tried the head as well, so that could be the issue. I honestly don't want to deal with editable mesh if I don't have to, so I hope editable poly isn't the actual problem. I'll be quite happy if the head being separate is the only issue.

On a side note, the parented box he is holding and the hat which is position constrained, (and that constraint is animated throughout between the biped head, and biped hand): is there anything I can do to make certain those align with him correctly in game through exporting, or am I pretty much stuck baking the animations and hoping?

Thanks again for the suggestion, I'll check if it works.

Torque Owner Eugene Schaeffer
#3
01/15/2008 (10:24 pm)
It appears that you are correct, but another element is that apparently it MUST be editable mesh instead of editable poly, which annoys me greatly (I figured that would have updated over time). It's sad, since editable mesh hasn't been updated for several versions and certain tools just aren't available in mesh, so if any future adjustments are necessary it becomes a potential pain (that and smoothing groups are more efficient in poly it seems).

I appreciate the suggestion. I get the feeling I may need more help in the future though...