Group Update #2

February 5, 2013

This week our group was tasked with creating two characters for our final cinematic, texturing, rigging and animating them. I had the job of UV mapping and texturing the mutant model (made by Matt) and rigging the Jane model (made by Shannon). I did learn something from this, however. When Shannon was finished creating a custom running animation, I immediately tried porting the character to UDK. Aside from forgetting to rename the second spine in her model (oops!), nothing was wrong. It ported just fine to fbx and then just fine into UDK. The problem came when I tried previewing the animation in the Skeletal Mesh previewer. When I set the AnimSet and the correct animation sequence and clicked play, nothing happened. I was puzzled for a good hour. I tried everything from re-exporting the fbx to force deleting everything in the package and re-importing. It came down to me opening the model back up and taking a closer look at the animation layer of the CatParent. When I looked at the animation in Max, I noticed nothing at first. Click play and the animation played just fine. However, I looked down at the timeline and there was the problem. Can you guess what it was?

The problem was that when Shannon made her original animation, she edited the default running animation, which has no keys set on the timeline. It is built directly into Max. Since her animation had no keys set, the fbx file had no keys baked into it, but no information at those key marks. So when UDK tried to play the animation, nothing happened because it had no information on what was occurring in those key frames. This was such a simple fix. All I did was find the end point of her animation (which was 30 frames in), then set keys every 5 frames for a smooth animation. When I re-exported and imported back into UDK, the animation worked. Huzzah! Such a simple fix, but I overlooked it a thousand times trying to figure out what was wrong. Occam's Razor is indeed true.

EDIT: Turns out she didn't just edit the default walking animation. She created her own. I still don't understand how keys were not used in the animation.