The Best At Character Animation, Bar-None!

[Ran13]

You can export characters as a 3DS file or you could and probably still can with a plug-in from Arthur Walasek…as an obj file…best to build your model as all 4 point patches.

You can export action files as bvh files.

So, yes, you can export characters and animation.

You can also render the animation in A:M with an alpha channel and composite all with whatever you’ve created in another program. But that takes more organization and planning than some want to attempt.

Kevin

My primary use for A:M used to be game development. Therefore compositing is out of the question. My renderer is the HL2 engine, or the Doom3 engine, or the Nebula Device or the Torque engine, or whatever my latest project uses. I’m not a programmer, but I’ve been told by programmers that the A:M SDK makes it difficult to get at the bone data for some reason, so I have had little luck in getting custom tools made to get my work out of A:M, especially on the animation side of things.

With all the different game engine formats I require from time to time, a valuable conversion tool for me was MilkShape3D. Milkshape has a BVH importer, but bvh’s coming out of A:M do nothing but create “star trek transporter accidents” out of my animations. I’ve tried limiting my rigs to straight forward rigid binding (no weighted CP’s, no fancy constraint systems) and FK, I’ve tried baking the actions before export…you name it, I’ve tried it. No joy…

I moved on.

[onikaze]

THe feature of exporting bvh is listed but It doesn’t work well at all. There is a breakdown in eithr the exporting or the Baking of the action beforehand that makes the file pretty much useless. I put a bug report into hashover a month ago with nothing to show for it.

[Obnomauk]

have we all had our say here?

i’ll ask one more time please. thanks.

-David

[KenH]

Haven’t got the foggiest what he’s going on about. It sounds like a lumberjack program with all that CHOPPING going on! In fairness, Houdini is one 3D program I’ve never got the opportunity to use, so it is totally alien to me.

All I know is I can save my motions in AM and drag them onto a similar skeleton to re-use them. Nothing could be more elegant than that.

[KenH]

With all the different game engine formats I require from time to time, a valuable conversion tool for me was MilkShape3D. Milkshape has a BVH importer, but bvh’s coming out of A:M do nothing but create “star trek transporter accidents” out of my animations. I’ve tried limiting my rigs to straight forward rigid binding (no weighted CP’s, no fancy constraint systems) and FK, I’ve tried baking the actions before export…you name it, I’ve tried it. No joy…

I moved on.

As has AM. It’s ability to export to game engines has advanced quite considerably.

[Obnomauk]

I guess just asking people to be grown up and move on isn’t going to cut it

I think both sides have had their turn on the soap box, so we can just call this one done, eh?

-David