Exporting 3DS Max animated biped character into Assimp
- by Doug Kavendek
I've been having some trouble with MD5 meshes exported from 3DS Max into my C++ program, using Assimp to import the model and its skeletal animation. If the models were rigged manually with bones, the export and animations work perfectly, but if they were rigged as a biped character, the animation hits a "deadly import error" and all the bones appear to get smooshed together into a big pile. This seems like it might just be a limitation of the MD5 exporter (we're currently using the one found here.
Our plan is to try out a different MD5 exporter (this one), and if that still has problems, then try switching from MD5 to COLLADA.
Our modeler won't be able to make time to try out these other exporters for a few days, so in the meantime I wanted to see if there were any better methods out there for getting biped rigged models from 3DS Max into our app via Assimp. Out of Assimp's supported formats, I need to figure out which will support the following:
Skeletal animations
Exportable from 3DS Max biped rigged models
Failing that, an alternative would be a way to convert a biped character to its corresponding bones before exporting. We did find one script to do that, but it only seems meant as a starting point for modeling -- it doesn't carry over any hierarchy, skinning, or animation -- so it can't be used solely during export.
