UE3 - UT3 Number of Bones

[Ric444]

Is there an upper limit on the number of bones that a custom character can have? When I import the character PSK files I am not seeing all of the bones. This results in errors in the animation.
Thanks for any help.

 

[Dogger]

What 3D app are you using.

 

[Ric444]

3ds max 2009.
I think I figured it out. It seems to be 376. The character has a lot of tentacles, so was going to use spline IK to animate them. I'm going to simplify the rig and take out a few tentacles to get the number down.

This is frustrating, but good. At least I'm figuring out the limitations of Unreal so that next time I can plan accordingly.

 

[Anuxinamoon]

There is a limit (forgive me I cannot remember at this point in time, you can find it on udn) to the number of bones a chunk can hold. They say that you shouldn't do more than one chunk, but when we ripped apart the GOW2 upk's and found many character with multiple chunks we were confused.

I'd read up on Bone limits and chunks on UDN if I were you .

 

[Dogger]

Do you mean bone influence to each verticie?, if thats the case then i suggest keeping it to a max of 4.

 

[Ric444]

Thanks all. I'm reading the UDN material now.

Dogger, I've run into that problem with older and open source game engines, so I know to avoid that issue. One sledgehammer to the head is enough. To anyone reading, Dogger makes a great point.

 

[InAction]

The limit is around 74 bones due to DirectX 9 limitations, going above that splits the character into an extra rendering pass.

If you have over 300 bones you better have one insanely good looking creature/character or you better start optimizing.