Cinema 4d to XSI Pipeline

[xfon5168]

Hi,

I've been trying to get meshes, including animations, into XSI all day without any luck. I've tried the MDD exporter, PointCache tag, FBX format, the Collada format in r11, and then combinations of them all - nothing seems to work. It is just your standard rigged mesh, using the joint system (I tried bones as well), without anything complex.

The reason I'm trying to do this, is to setup shaders and then export to be compatible with XNA (using .X and .fbx formats). I'd love to use Cinema 4d and skip XSI, but the FBX exporter is a disaster, and so is the .X file exporter - including the X-Port plugin.

If anyone has some ideas, any help would be great, thanks.

Are you using HyperNURBS in Cinema when using Collada? Turn off your HyperNURBS when you export your rig. Also, I don't think Cinema has IK support for Collada yet. So if you're using animation with IK on your Rig, Bake it to the joints themselves and see if that helps.

[valedon]

Thanks for the reply. HyperNURBS is off, but I am using IK - how can I bake to the joints?

[xfon5168]

Thanks for the reply. HyperNURBS is off, but I am using IK - how can I bake to the joints?

In the Timeline, select all of your joints, choose Functions>Bake Objects. Be sure to turn off create copy.

[valedon]

That seemed promising so I tried a bunch of things but it still isn't working (.DAE and .FBX with baked joints). On import the weighting is amazingly deformed, and the joints aren't animating correctly, but they are now actually animated so thats a plus. I simplified the files to the bare bones before exporting and I tried baking PLA, but that didn't work either. Any other ideas?

[xfon5168]

That seemed promising so I tried a bunch of things but it still isn't working (.DAE and .FBX with baked joints). On import the weighting is amazingly deformed, and the joints aren't animating correctly, but they are now actually animated so thats a plus. I simplified the files to the bare bones before exporting and I tried baking PLA, but that didn't work either. Any other ideas?

Could you maybe post the file? I can take a look at it and see if I can do anything to it to make it work. I don't have XSI though, but i could have a crack at it.

[Per-Anders]

Yes please if you can post the file (or even a file example that shows the problem), there are a number of XSI users among us that may be able to help, but without an example file it can be hard to see exactly what may not be working for you.

[valedon]

Hi,

I don't think I can post what I'm working on so I attached a stripped down version of a file that comes with Cinema 4d, which is setup in the same way - I hope im allowed to.

I'm also just using the XSI Mod Tool that you can download for free, as it comes with a good pipeline to XNA, along with the latest Collada and FBX plugins. You can get it here if you're up for it. http://www.softimage.com/downloads/XSI_Mod_Tool/default.aspx

My files are deformed if I import back into Cinema 4D anyway as well, and the deformation looks similar to that in XSI so I must be doing something wrong. Hopefully you guys can help.

Thanks

[Suricate]

Hi valedon,

I just made a quick test exporting the deformations from C4D using my 'MDDWriter' plugin. I can reimport the deformations fine with 'MDDReader'. I also can pülay back the deformations in messiah:Studio just fine. So my guess would be that the XSI Mod Tool doesn't handle the MDD import correctly. I don't have access to that programm, so I cannot verify this.

[danb]

So has anyone gotten a character that is rigged (without IK) and baked into xsi mod tool from c4d? I would not like to use baked geometry because i do not think that game engines will use baked geo. Anyone know if that is correct?

Can the valve engine use bones?

And for those that are using xsi mod tool, what does one do once animation is imported in order to prepare that scene for the valve engine?

Thanks.

[valedon]

Hi,

You are correct, the game engines will not support baked geomtry, and I found that XSI can't import bones (bones native to XSI) through any format. You can import .dae and .fbx formats into XSI, and you will have a rigged animated character, but the bones are always converted to nulls, and there is no way around that it seems.
If you then try exporting from XSI using the nulls, there are options to attempt to convert the rig back to bones, but during all the testing I did the bones and models always ended up deformed. To avoid having to rerig in XSI I had to export straight from C4D using the .FBX format, which you can use within XNA (required extra programming).

For other engines like Valve, I believe most require their own proprietary format where .FBX isn't an option, and almost all plugins that export to engines are not compatible with C4D. Based on the issues I was having going from C4D>XSI>XNA (you may not have the same issues using the Valve plugin), and if you are trying to avoid rigging in XSI, I would try 3ds Max as it has excellent plugin support, and the pipeline from C4D using .FBX seems to have less problems. You'll have to do some research through Google to figure out what to do after that.

As xfon5168 mentioned earlier about baking the joints, that is the only way you'll get a nice export to any program. Bake everything then clean up the scene (removing extra nulls etc) and get it down to just the model, the skin object, and the joints/bones, then export as .FBX. Import the .FBX to your secondary program, research how to prep it, then export it using the plugin for the engine. Rigging in the program you'll be using to export to the engine defintely seems to be the most problem free way to go though.


I just made a quick test exporting the deformations from C4D using my 'MDDWriter' plugin. I can reimport the deformations fine with 'MDDReader'. I also can pülay back the deformations in messiah:Studio just fine. So my guess would be that the XSI Mod Tool doesn't handle the MDD import correctly. I don't have access to that programm, so I cannot verify this.

I managed to get baked animated geometry to work with your plugins, but that was before I knew I needed bones, thanks though.


Thanks for help so far everyone, I almost have the perfect rig formula going from C4D to XNA using .FBX (still some weird axis issues sometimes) but it's almost there.

[xanthippos]

Hi valendon!

So, can you tell us how your pipeline works?
am actually working on a game for the XBOX 360 using Cinema4d and XNA as well. but i get that annoying problem of losing all my animation when exporting to FBX

it would be nice to hear how you solved the problem.

greets

[danb]

How are you getting, or what program do you use, to get the bone rigged character from c4d into xna format?

[xanthippos]

cinema4d supports the export to FBX format.
this can be read by the XNA Library.

unfortunately cinema4d doesnt seem to export all the animations. when i import the FBX to cinema again, all animations are lost and the model stands in t-pose

[wolf-cub-one]

cinema4d supports the export to FBX format.
this can be read by the XNA Library.

unfortunately cinema4d doesnt seem to export all the animations. when i import the FBX to cinema again, all animations are lost and the model stands in t-pose

First, sorry guys that I have not been visiting this site recently. Second, I'm sorry also that I did figured a way to export c4d animation using .fbx to xna but have since forgotten how to do it since I haven't touched xna in months. I was able to export the wipix rabbit as a test to xna and was able to control it with an xbox 360 controller on my computer. I reformatted my harddrive recently and I think I forgot to save all my xna files. I'll look for them but I doubt it.

Here is what I remember, sorry I forgot some of the xna terminology but the character export to xna only allows like 50 bones or something. The wipix rabbit was way more than this. What I did was exported out as .fbx just to see what the result would be in xna. I got the an error as expected but it read the file with a warning that indicated too many bones. The trick I did was export the character from c4d as fbx but import it back into c4d. This helped me see what was broken and why. If I remember correctly, a lot of the xpresso stuff you can see gets broken. Also, null under bones don't work. I got rid of the xpresso stuff that I felt were not really needed for the rabbit in xna like I think stuff with ear and tail. Nulls within bone hierarchy I used mocca tools to convert to bone . I did all of this from the orginal c4d file not the fbx. I just used the fbx version to see what was broken and how it was broken. It help me figure out which bones or nulls I needed to keep and which I could afford to get rid of to get under the bone/joint (sorry, been awhile since I used xna) limit required for xna. I barely made it using the rabbit since it had way too many bones but I was lazy and did not want to make a character from scratch.

Sorry, if this is too vague but like I said it's been months since I played with xna. The only reason I stopped was that I didn't know enough AI programming and it was only a hobby. I hope that this may help one of you.

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