Moving into animation

[Zeph]

Yeah, for a few of the things I'm doing for school, I'm needing to animate for Unreal 3. I understand the process and can do it in Maya, but I'd really prefer to get it done in Max. Anyone able to make a simple tutorial on how to get things, weapons for now, rigged so they'll export with Actor X?

[Phopojijo]

I'm a Maya dude unfortunately.

[Phopojijo]

http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/ActorXMaxTutorial.html

Should mention -- this is Epic's tutorial for it... I assume you've already read it though...

(necessarily double-post)

[p0lar_bear]

Like I was saying to you on AIM, I've done basic stuff with just envelopes; I'm not sure if that's the most professional way to do it, but it seems to get the job done. As usual, you caught me at a bad time and I had my focus elsewhere.

When you make a character, make sure that any and all joints on the skin mesh match the skeleton to make rigging easier and so it doesn't look like crap when animated. For example, the reason I gave that Sim version of myself to Choking Victim to rig was because the standard Halo marine skeleton's pelvis was situated higher than the skin mesh's waist, and my limited ability couldn't handle that.

From here on in, what I'm going to say might not be accurate in the least. Look around Max and try to match up what I'm saying to what's there. I haven't done this in a while.

Make a skeleton if you don't already have one, and add a Skin modifier to your skin mesh. Max will automatically create envelopes around the bones; any vertices inside these envelopes will move with the bone they correspond to. Select a bone in Edit Envelopes mode and use the tools to expand, contract, lengthen, shorten, etc the envelope until it gets just a little more than what vertices should move with the bone. Then, select any vertices that you do NOT want to move with the bone, and then hit the Exclude (or something like that) button to ensure they do not move. Keep in mind that a bone should only move the vertices that are relevant to it; "stacking" weights (such as tying the vertices of a hand to both the hand bone and the arm's bone) will result in the stacked vertices moving in the direction of all bones they're tied to.

[Zeph]

Yeah, that one pretty much just explains how to use actorX, not set up a scene for it. Well, aside from axis orientation.

[Phopojijo]

http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/SkeletalSetup.html#Bone%20Attachments

This might help, this is how to do it in UnrealEngine2.