After spending quite some time attempting to get something exported and playing in the preview, I’ve discovered that the exported model will not appear in the preview player, if I have “Include skinning data” checked.

The model in question is a simple single-object Editable Mesh, weighed to a hierarchy of bones via the Skin Modifier, with animations done in the Motion Mixer, and a sequences.txt file done in the proper format.

I know it’s not the animations - as the model will not appear, even if the animation options are unselected, so long as the “Include skinning data” is checked.

I would appreciate it if someone could give me an idea of what could cause this problem, as I’m frankly out of ideas - and I’ve followed every step I could find on the process.

Thanks

i am not to shure if this is still true, but in the first release of away3d 4 there was a limit of joints you could use for skeletonAnimation (i think it was 23).

maybe you got to many joints?
there are some more restrictions on the usage of joints:
- there is a limit of joints per verticle (i think 3 or 4)
- all verticles need to have same number of jointsWeights
- all jointsWeights of a Verticle must add up to be exact 1

i think the exporter should take care of all this, but since i dont use 3ds i cant tell…

I’ll have to check that out - as the model does have well over 23 bones (80 to be exact). If this ends up being the reason, can you recommend a method to use a model with that number of bones inside Away3D?

wow 80 bones what animal it is ?
you can try md5 maybe but awd is best

So I took another look at the mesh/bones/etc, and I think I discovered the problem. It seems the AWD exporter does not like bones that don’t actually have verts weighed to them. At least half, if not more of these bones were intended for attachment points for various billboards/objects - which, thankfully - wasn’t important for my intentions.

The first thing I tried was simply adding the 3 bones that were not added to the Skin Modifier, but either a) were animated directly, or b) were animated due to the hierarchy. Tried exporting, and still - nothing. So I went through and selected the attachment point bones, deleted them, and exported-  and it worked perfectly.

So, long story short - the exporter apparently expects all bones to be weighed to the mesh.

Interesting limitation. Anyone knows if it has been lifted since January ?
If not, will it be lifted in AWD 2.1 ?

And if not, how can we add attachment points to our models ? I assume these are spots used to center clothes, items, or other interaction events on the model in game.

Thanks if you can answer this quite crucial question for me.