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Author Topic: Need help Importing Animation From maya with FSMs[SOLVED]  (Read 3387 times)

jasperPT

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Need help Importing Animation From maya with FSMs[SOLVED]
« on: May 05, 2013, 08:47:18 AM »
Hello all,
I am a little new to unity and playmaker however spending as much time trying to learn as possible.
I am having an issue trying to replicate the work done in this playmaker tutorial :
I can get it to work perfectly fine with the default constructor that comes with Unity, however when I try to do it with my own character it does not work.

I will step you through the process i take so that hopefully somone will spot something completely obvious that I am doing wrong.

1. I export my character and animation out of Maya as an FBX file.
I have a rig constructed that uses no referencing and has bones that get baked out into the fbx so there are no constraints or anything in my export, just geometry + animated bones (image 01)


2. I drag the exported file into my Unity Project, and use the inspector to cut up my clips in unity (image 02) I have "Idle" and "Walk" for this test.

These clips seem to have imported fine, as they play in my inspector when i select them.

3. I drag this FBX file from the Inspector to the hierarchy, and add an "Animations" component to it, then drag the "Idle" and "Walk" animation clips into the correct places for the Animations Component. (I just copied how it was layed out on the Constructor)

Now I setup my FSM with what is seemingly the same setup as the tutorial posted above, however nothing happens when I hit play on my scene. (Image 03)

However, when I setup an animation controller with these clips (the unity one, not in an FSM) they seem to play on my character, but will not be controlled by the FSM.

Any help would be very much appreciated, I have spent 2 days now trying to find a solution to this with various rigs, exports and countless online tutorials.

Cheers.
« Last Edit: May 07, 2013, 03:59:43 AM by jeanfabre »

Red

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Re: Need help Importing Animation From maya with FSMs
« Reply #1 on: May 05, 2013, 10:30:01 AM »
There's only one thing i would wonder about with the way you've got the character set up... Does the character in the project tab have it's animations (the middle "tab" in the inspector) set to be using the legacy animation system?

The old method of animating with playmaker as outlined in that video is before mecanim came out and if you're using Unity 4, all your animated assets are automatically assumed to be bipedal mecanim characters... and the tutorial that you have to help you set that up isn't made to use Mecanim so it's basically going "okay, i have to trigger this animation... but, it's using a different animation structure that i'm not familiar with... so, i guess this action needs to be ignored."

I had this happen to me and if that is what is happening, then you know what you need to do... if, however, this doesn't solve it, i'm not sure i can really offer much help.

to change it, click the root of the character in the project tab. from there, the inspector should have a section with three "tabs" (which are just three buttons butted up to one-another) and the middle one is where the rigging information is translated. there will be a drop-down under that with a couple choices but for this, use the "legacy." once you've clicked that, hit apply and then see if that solves your issue.

jasperPT

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Re: Need help Importing Animation From maya with FSMs
« Reply #2 on: May 05, 2013, 06:41:37 PM »
you absolute champion!

That is exactly what I needed thanks so much.

As a side note, is it now recommended to use mecanim then? If so Ill start learning how to rig all that up instead.

Red

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Re: Need help Importing Animation From maya with FSMs
« Reply #3 on: May 05, 2013, 08:20:21 PM »
Ahh, well, that kinda depends.

right now as far as i understand the mecanim actions are still being worked on (though they're probably in a very late beta stage at this point.) as in, there's a ton of functionality between PM and Mecanim now, but if i recall, i don't know if it's 100% integrated yet.

that said, it's got a lot of functionality... and it is a really good system (i've been learning it... because it's poised to save me weeks worth of work animating if mecanim behaves exactly as advertised.) so, it might be worth trying both out to see which one jives better with how you want to do things.

That said, if this was next year, yeah, i'd suggest mecanim... as far as i understand it, as the Unity platform evolves, there are some whispers that the legacy system might be outmoded in a future version. though, that's more just rumour than anything else so take it with a grain of salt.

MurDocINC

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Re: Need help Importing Animation From maya with FSMs
« Reply #4 on: May 05, 2013, 09:44:29 PM »
That said, if this was next year, yeah, i'd suggest mecanim... as far as i understand it, as the Unity platform evolves, there are some whispers that the legacy system might be outmoded in a future version. though, that's more just rumour than anything else so take it with a grain of salt.
That's no rumour, it's a fact.
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/MecanimAnimationSystem.html, last sentence.