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Please take note! For mod developers working with Unreal Tournament 2003, this documentation is meant to be a starting point for your own explorations into UT2003, not a definitive guide. There will be differences between the documentation here and the product in your hands, and you may have to figure out quite a bit for yourself. Check out the Unreal Tournament 2003 page in the Unreal Powered area for links to community sites if you're having problems. UDN is a licensee support site, and cannot provide technical support or game-specific assistance to end users.
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ActorXMayaTutorial |
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How to export animations using ActorX and Maya
Document Summary: A tutorial showing how to export animations using ActorX with Maya.
Document Changelog: Last updated by Chris Sturgill (DemiurgeStudios) to modeling document collation. Originally created by Vito Miliano (UdnStaff).
This document assumes that you have already created and rigged your actor and are simply looking for a step-by-step tutorial on how to use the ActorX exporter to export your model and animations out of Maya and into Unreal. This also assumes that you have already read the ActorX documentation on the UDN site and understand conceptually the relationship between .PSK files and .PSA files.
- Download the ActorX plug-in for Maya and copy it to your plug-ins directory.
- Launch Maya, then enable the plug-in (go to Settings->Plug-In Manager) by checking the "loaded" check-box. Check "auto load" if you want it to be automatically loaded every time you run Maya.
The plugin will recognize both regular polygonal, textured geometry
as well as skin clusters. The main requirement is that your mesh
consists of a single hierarchy, linked together with joints. The exporter doesn't care what methods are used to animate the joints; the entire scene is sampled through the desired frame range, and at each frame the end result is what gets exported.
Note that in Maya 5.0, the effect of IK handles on animation may not get exported correctly unless you ensure they have their "Sticky" attribute set.
- Load a scene containing the actor you wish to export.
- Bring up the ActorX dialog by typing "axmain" in the MEL command window at the bottom of Maya.
- Fill in the various fields as follows:
- Output folder: enter the name of the directory where you wish to save the .PSK file. We recommend putting an "Unreal Files" directory under your actor's folder. The browse button is very useful here.
- Mesh file name: enter the name for the .PSK file. We recommend the name of your actor.
- Click the "Save mesh/refpose button". You can do this with any frame of the animation. It is recommended that your model's reference pose be in a relaxed, spread eagle pose for ease of use.
After you save the mesh/refpose, a few windows will pop up if all went well.
There are two steps for exporting animations. First, load the scene containing your animation(s) and "digest" an animation to read it into memory. Repeat for as many animations as you would like to export this session. Second, add these new animations to a PSA file and save it back out.
- Load the file containing the animation you wish to export.
- Bring up the ActorX dialog by typing "axmain" in the MEL command window at the bottom of Maya.
- Fill in the various fields as follows:
- Output folder: same as for skeleton/mesh above.
- Animation file name: we recommend the same as the mesh file name (they will have a different extension to help you tell them apart). Enter the name of your existing .PSA file if you wish to add this animation to that existing .PSA
- Animation sequence name: this is how the animation will be identified within the .PSA file.
- Animation range: specify the frames in the current scene that define this animation. (Format is "4-45"; number, hyphen, number)
- Make sure that the range slider and the time slider show 0 as the first frame. (Note: this is a superstitious behavior on our part to avoid a periodic crashing bug in ActorX. Skip this step at your own peril)
- Click "Digest Animation". When it is done, you should see a pop-up message box describing the animation. If you don't see this pop-up then something went wrong and we recommend restarting Maya at this point because the plug-in is most likely now in a corrupted state.
- Repeat steps 1-5 for as many animations as you would like to export this session. We recommend not trying to do too many at once in case ActorX crashes and you have to start over.
Once you have digested one or more animations you are ready to add them to a .PSA file.
- Bring up the "axmain" dialog if it is not already displayed.
- Click the "animation manager" button to display the animation manager.
- If you are adding your animations to an existing .PSA file, click "Load" to load the .PSA file. (assumes that you already provided the name of the animation file in step 3b of the previous section. If not, then use the "Load As" button)
- On the left in the "animations" list you should see the animations that you have just digested. On the right you will see any animations that already exist in the .PSA file. This will be empty if you are creating a new .PSA file.
- Select your new animations and click "-->" to add your animations to the output package.
- Click "Save" to save the .PSA file back out. (assumes you already provided the name of the animation file previously)
Additional ActorX options
ActorX also has several additional options. By typing "axoptions" in the MEL command window, you can bring up this options window. Note, this cannot be opened while the axmain window is open. Simply close one window before opening the next. We'll step through the options in order.
These two options are fairly self explanatory; when checked, they will keep your settings in the fields above them, so that you won't have to re-enter them every time you want to export a mesh or an animation.
These options will determine what conditions need to be filled in deciding the exported geometry/animation.
If this is checked, every mesh in the file bound to a skeleton it will be exported.
All geometry that has a texture on it will be exported.
This option is disabled.
This option will force the use of the pose at T=0 as the reference pose. Only useful in case you're exporting your PSK from a file that also has animation at other frames, and somehow the first frame of the slider isn't frame 0 in the animation. By default, the engine will use the first frame of the active slider range for exporting the PSK file, which is why we recommend that frame 0 is part of the active range.
In general, you should always export your PSK from a known, specially posed, static reference pose, so there is no potential for exporting a random pose as your reference pose.
Always leave this option off. Otherwise, ignore this option.
Smoothing on skeletal models is handled somewhat strangely in UnrealEd. If you try to put smoothing groups on a character model, the exporter will break your model along the edge of the groups, and make that section its own separate piece. This process involves dividing vertices along smoothed edges. It will then attempt to smooth the individual piece by itself, although it will still appear to be part of a larger "connected" mesh.
In other words, in exchange for smoothing, you will increase your vertex count. The more smoothing groups you have, the more vertices you will have. Therefore, smoothing groups are discouraged on skeletal models; it is recommended that you leave this option unchecked.
This is fairly self-explanatory. Names in your maya file, such as joint names, containing underscores will be affected.
Very important. If the mesh is composed of quads when exported, errors will result when brought into UnrealEd. Triangles will be missing. However, it is recommended to triangulate the mesh in Maya yourself for more predictable triangulation.
This option is disabled.
This option is disabled.
Ignore this option. Currently, results are inconsistent.
If your model is animated such that the root bone moves, this option gives you the opportunity to disable that motion. Meaning, if you create a run cycle in Max that translates forward, this option will make it look as if the model is running in place in UnrealEd.
Ignore this option.
This is pretty self-explanatory. These are just a convenient source for people to check if they suspect something isn't exporting correctly. You can find a variety of information here; bones list with heirarcy information, vertex/face/frame numbers and material # slots etc. Besides verifying that the skeletal and skin data exported as expected, you would want to look at these for example if you want to know what the internal name of the bones are, for using bone controllers or attachments.
Script used to be necessary to import models and animations into Unreal. Thankfully, this is no longer true. Unless you know what you are doing with these fields, ignore them.
This option is disabled.
Additional MEL commands
"axwritesequence": A quicksave command for skeletal animations which writes out the currently loaded scene, with its entire animation range as a single sequence with the sequence- and .PSA filename identical to the Maya source art filename.
"axprocesssequence" always saves the .psa to the source art folder, and otherwise works just like "axwritesequence".
"axwriteposes": Similar to axwritesequence, but dumps each frame in a single-pose PSA file, and attaches the frame number to each file and internal sequence name. Note: Some versions of the editor's animationbrowser importer don't properly handle importing/displaying single frame sequences.
See also the new persistent "no popup confirmations" checkbox in the "axoptions" window to make these commands effectively interaction-free.
Simple old style, non-skeletal vertex animation data can be exported through a separate window, called up with "axvertex".
Note that using vertex animation is discouraged - the skeletal rendering is more efficient, and has an interactive import art path
into the animation browser in the editor, and offers far more options like rigidizing parts and LOD sprites, that vertex animated meshes don't have.
The options in the popup window are self-explanatory - for documentation on the vertex animation art path, see UnrealVertexAnimation.
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