3ds Max 2014 to Unity

HI everyone, I was wondering if any of you knew the appropiate way to export my rigged character from 3DS Max 2014 to unity with animations. The Rig I currently have is composed of bones (not biped/CAT), IKs, morphers and shapes as controls , with a complex hierarchy. I don't know if there is the posibility that all this can be imported. Do I have to change something? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Exporting from max can be easy and annoying at the same time. I find that the pivot points are what ruin me as I don't tend to pay attention to them when exporting. But to export you would just do file export, save the name, under Include-animation make sure animation and bake animation is checked, check out your axis conversion to make sure it's y up or z up depending on how you model, and finally the the export type.

 

Thanks for the reply. Yeah i already exported some rigs with animation but there are always some problems. I suspect it's cause of the control i made. they don't export but in 3ds max, they are part of the hierarchy.

 

Try exporting your character to FBX, then import it not into Unity but 3ds Max again, this way you'll have a character with bone/helper animation, then export this one to FBX and to Unity.

 

If you share your rig & animation control setup (shapes as controls), I'll share my export setup.
Foestar has it right and Rinoa's suggestion is a good testing process.

I've had the best success by excluding the controls on a rigged character. Since Unity only reads the bone transformation/rotation information the controls that drive those bones do not matter inside Unity.
Regarding morphs the best suggestions I have retained is to keep the deformed mesh as light as possible for run-time optimization purposes. So if you have a morph modifier applied to an entire character model that deforms verts on the head only, if possible separate the head mesh from the body. The same rule of thumb that's suggested when dealing with morphs within Max.

 

Agree with all the suggestions above, but one thing I always make sure each bones corresponds correctly to the mecanim avatar setup, I have an experience where the neck bone were registered as a chest bone by doing the avatar automatically, and it made the animation a bit funny, going back and forth exporting from 3dsmax to unity, only to found the bones in the avatar was registered on a wrong node..

 

romi I've not experienced this myself (yet), but I've read others who have when they use character studio's default setup.
The default setup has the clavicle bones parented to the base neck bone. (Never understood that)
There is an option under the hierarchy tab when biped is in figure mode, in the structure drop down to change the default parenting to triangle neck. This parents the clavicle bones correctly to the top spine bone.

This should automatically fix the odd funniness in the animations after setting up the avatar.

I'm not bashing on character studio though. I like it a lot better than CAT simply because I'm comfortable with the pose management and can quickly copy/mirror and edit poses which speed up developing animation cycles greatly.
I find using CS as enjoyable for animating bipedal characters as much as custom created rigs. They each have there positives and negatives.

 

Oh I see then, I'm indeed using Character Studio, glad to know it is a CS specific problem, not Unity...thanks for clearing that up theANMATOR2b..