RE: Crosswalk Maya to XSI to Maya woes...

[Fredrick Fassé <fredrick.fasse(at)yager.de>]

When you say Rest Pose, I take it you mean Bind pose? I’ve always exported from this rest/bind pose to try and avoid potential problems. And when applying animation, I can only do so after I’ve removed the neutral pose.

 

Unforunately I only use XSI Bone chains when I need to use IK. Otherwise I’m stuck with nulls to animate which is not pleasant to work with. I’ve been working on a script to add a shadow rig with which I can comfortably animate but this has been put on the side burner while we get through these next few milestones.

 

But in short, these offsets we are experience are coming from somewhere so if it’s possible you can elaborate a little more, I’d really appreciate it J

 

Thanks!

 

 

From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of javier
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 9:20 AM
To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Subject: Re: Crosswalk Maya to XSI to Maya woes...

 

To get the correct orientation you have to make sure to do the export at rest position otherwise you will have additive rotations. Ive never done Maya-XSI-Maya but i have exported XSI bone chains into maya and then rebuilt ik in maya, as long as i set all animation parameters to rest pose just before export (without muting animation, simpply setting the parameters to rest rotations) then it works fine. Otherwise I end up with offsets. Maybe it is this that you are experiencing?

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 8:25 AM, Fredrick Fassé <fredrick.fasse(at)yager.de> wrote:

Cool this actually sounds promising. I will look into this asap!!!  I personally would rather be using XSI all the time and I do regarding animation however our other animators need a Maya version so this bone SRT issue is really irritating. I think it's time I tried again to convert them to XSI.

Anyways this idea should help get us through this mess as long as it works :P

 

Thanks again!

 

 

 

From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of David Gallagher
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 3:34 PM
To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Subject: Re: Crosswalk Maya to XSI to Maya woes...

 

If you're just using xsi for the great weighting tools, could you consider getting it back in Maya, then saving out the weights in Maya, and loading the new weights onto the pre-exported version of the character? I've done this before.



Fredrick Fassé wrote:

Hey folks,

 

I'm at my wits end with this problem and I have already sent Softimage Support an email however I thought it would be a good idea to poke your wonderful brains here on the newsgroup.

 

Anyways we are currently experiencing a major issue when re-exporting skinned character assets from XSI 6.5 to Maya 2008 using Crosswalk 2.5.1.

 

The problem is once we've skinned a character in XSI and bring it back into Maya, our animators are unable to apply "IK Handle Tool" due to some process involved with Crosswalk.

 

The reason I believe that Crosswalk is at fault is that when we try to apply the "IK Handle Tool" in Maya, we get an awkward pop and the arm will refuse to deform… as if it is stuck in gimble lock. It could be a scale or translational offset however we are not 100% sure.

 

I have tried many tests re-exporting assets from Maya into XSI and back again and I have found out that when I do a "Crosswalk Import" into XSI, so long as I click OFF "Optimize For XSI"  this "IK Handle Tool" works fine upon re-importation of assets into Maya. However this won't solve our problem as this test involved re-importing and exporting an older version of a character skinned in Maya. I Was at that point more or less trying to narrow down the problem.

 

Currently the only options available at this time is retargeting in Motionbuilder however this involves us having to retarget for all mocap files so this approach is unfortunately not a viable one.

 

The problem is easily reproducible so hopefully someone with an idea can shed some light on this for us before I shoot my brains out! Seriously this issue is mind boggling!!!

 

Cheers,

Fred

 

 

---------------------------------------------------
Fredrick Fasse
Senior Animator

YAGER Development GmbH

Pfuelstr.5
10997 Berlin
Germany

tel:   +49 30 69597663
fax:   +49 30 69597680
web:   www.yager-development.com
email: fredrick.fasse(at)yager.de

 

-- 

David Gallagher

Character Development Lead Animator, Blue Sky Studios