The Unity-3ds Max paradox

This week hasn’t gone as smoothly as I anticipated. I’ve been focusing on making the Forest chieftain which is pretty similar to the Forest creep I did last week. With the Forest creep I also had some problems importing it in to Unity with inverted faces and the weapon not animating correctly. The weapon was easily fixed by removing the parent/child constraint in Motionbuilder and adding it again. Of course I forgot to plot the animation before exporting it to Unity and had to figure out that I had forgotten it. All these little things are what takes time in the production, I keep missing simple steps that messes up everything. Maybe we should make a step by step workflow chart, but for every model I make I do learn by the mistakes I make (mostly).

The inverted faces was a bigger problem. Firstly I fixed that in an afternoon with the Forest creep by doing something I didn’t remember when the problem occurred with the chieftain. So by not writing down the solution I spent over a day trying to fix the inverted faces on the chieftain while keeping the animations I already had done and without having to re-skin him. Luckily we had a graphics meeting with out teachers Jonatan and Lina where I brought up this problem. Jonatan showed me that if you right-click the scale button in 3ds Max you either have a scale of 100 or -100. I did that before I started animating but somehow I must have done something to the model to make it -100, and thats bad. The character on the left of the picture has a scale of -100 and he is very see-through..The one on the right is the result of a gruesome day of trial and error.

The solution is to reset the x-form and and a Normal modifier in 3ds Max. Sounds simple but keeping the skinning wasn’t, and in some magical way the first 10 (or so) tries was still inverted. This really confirms that 3D is magic and I am a halfbreed muggle..

After this the fun started, doing the high poly version of the creeps in sculpting program and that’s where I am now. I’ve also done the melee creeps high poly this week but as that character is much  less “organic” I did that all in 3Ds max, this is the result: