UE3 - UT3 Character import problem

[Marscaleb]

I modelled some boots in Maya and tried to import them into UT3. (I have a character to match, but I wanted to test the boot's animation since they wound up not quite lining up with the skeleton, so only the boots are imported right now.)

This is the first character import I've tried to do.

I set up the parts info in the ini file and I can indeed see the boots appear on the character when I try to customize it, but the boots are laying on the ground, and at roughly a 45-degree angle.
It looks like the boots just fell over, falling backwards and a little to the right.

Does anyone know what might be causing this?

Additional information:

-I totally suck at skinning, so when I skinned the boots to the skeleton I weighted them completely to the right and left calves.
-They stand up just normal when I view them in Unreal Ed.
-The instructions I was reading online said I would need to adjust the origin and rotOrigin to specific values, but they looked fine to me so I set them all to 0. I wouldn't be surprised if I had them rotated the wrong way by the yaw, but they stood up straight with the world origin in the right place inside of the editor, I figured I was good there.
But just to check, I went back and set the rotOrigin to the values specified, but after that nothing had changed; they were still lying on the ground with no change in angle.
-I did check the box for Assume Maya Coordinates.
-They appear to not move when lying on the ground, even though the "doing nothing" animation the character plays does show the boots moving a little bit with the default boots.

 

[Dogger]

Maya's native up axis is Y, Unreals and other games are Z up, try rotating the skeleton 45 degrees, if not it could be that you have exported with construction history on the boots themselves.

 

[Marscaleb]

Hmm, I'll admit that I didn't think to delete the construction history, just as wella s I'll admit I never thought it would make a difference.

And because of the whole Z-up Y-up thing, I could understand needing to rotate things to a 90-degree angle, or even inverting the mesh, but not rotating it to 45-degrees. That just doesn't make sense.

And when I played the animation in Maya it looked fine.

 

[Dogger]

sorry about that i ment 90 degrees, also remember to freeze transformations before binding to a skeleton

 

[Marscaleb]

also remember to freeze transformations before binding to a skeleton

Wait wait, what does that mean?

 

[Dogger]

When you translate, rotate or scale an object, they are stored in the channel box for that object. Freezing these out resets them to zero without effecting your geometry. Freeze transformations in located in the modify menu.

 

[Marscaleb]

Oh.
That automatically happens when you combine/seperate the objects.
So technically, I've already done that.

Good to know that there's a function for it, though.

 

[Marscaleb]

UPDATE

I tried reimporting it without the BassumeMayaCoordinates, and also was then forced to adjust the RotOrigin to get the boots to stand up straight in the editor. Still no change.

 

[TurdDrive]

sorry but lol

 

[Dogger]

Hmm, when you bind the boots to the skeleton, in the options for the smooth binding, have you got the remove unused influences check box ticked. If so then uncheck it, this removes the bones that have nothing binded to them on export and can cause problems such as this one. Also check to see if the bones actually exist within the editor.

 

[Marscaleb]

If the bones exist within the editor?
But, this is the default skeleton! How could they not be in the editor in their proper place? I'm not importing skeletal data.

But I'll check the remove unused influences thing.

And TurdDrive; you're right, I should laugh at that.

 

[Marscaleb]

If anyone want to take a look at the actual files, here's a link:

http://calebchild.boldlygoingnowhere.org/caleb/FUBARboots.zip

 

[InAction]

Have you managed to get it to work? Otherwise, follow the link in my signature and download that rig. You'll find a "Sample_DummyCharacter.mb" file, skin your boots to him, import your mesh and make sure you add the right offset values to the skeletal mesh.

Origin: Z: -51.000000
Rot Origin: Yaw: -90.00°

This should make things less problematic for you.

 

[Marscaleb]

Yes, I did finally get it sorted, thank you.

Sorry that I forgot to post an update on this thread.

What I did was get anohter copy of the animation file; the one I was using was somehow corrupted.

 

[TurdDrive]

someone ban him.

 

[Marscaleb]

someone ban him.

Heh. They removed that spam-post, so now it looks like you're saying to ban me.