I have 2 .max files with the skeleton in each. Skeletons are absolutely identical except some bone names. In one .max file skeleton skinned with the character’s body in another file skeleton skinned with the legs. So can I merge two skeletons by their bone transformations and color but not the bone names?
ps: as a result the bones should not be duplicated, and the body and legs should have a single skeleton.
the most easy and clean way to do it is just merge everything, delete what you don’t need, and link the rest the way you want.
thanks for your reply.
I need to do it frequently with a lot of skinned models. That’s why i’m looking for a better, more automatic way. Any suggestion on this?
of course i was talking about scripted way.
merge all
find all merged
in merged nodes find all that you need and delete all other
because you know how bones have to be linked, re-link them to one skeleton
i hope we are talking not about Biped and CAT
okay, this is something interesting. So you saying that’s possible to automatic find out wich bones I need (i.e. actually linked to the mesh) and wich are need to be deleted? very interesting. unfortunately my knowledges about maxscript are way too limited. Can you help me with a solution?
p.s.: this is not a Biped/CAT, just normal bones.
only you know what bones you have to delete and what to keep.
#1 you can make a two lists of bone names that have to be deleted with first merge and with second
or
#2 you can find not added to a skin bones or which have ZERO weight to all vertices
bone names are frequently changing. so it’s impossible to make bone names list. I thought that is possible somehow check and compare transformations/colors of the bones so they can be inter replaced.
color? it’s very specific.
i see a problem in how all your things are organized. as i said it could be a ‘merging rule’. for example, by using bones in skin.
anything else is too specific to a workflow your used.
there’s a perfect script made by gildor which can merge several skinned meshes by bone names. It imports .psk files.
I want something similar but in my case bones transformations are the same only. Names are always different.
I mentioned bone color because I have extra bones which I coloring in red and they sometimes have the same position as normal bones. Although, those bones are also have different length so this parameter can be used instead of color to distinguish them off of normal bones.
I attached 2 max files in which you can find 2 parts of the whole body. I deleted unnecessary bones for now. But is still need to merge several bones. All the bones are from one generic skeleton which I made myself using normal 3ds max bones. The merging can be done by .fbx export/import I believe but only if all the bones will have same names.
Ok, I have an idea. Basically I need to have both skeletons with the same names.
So, I have 2 max files: one with the skeleton with “bad” names and another one with the skeleton with “good” names.
I need to import good skeleton on top of the bad skeleton so the bad skeleton bone names to be named as the good skeleton bone names. Position and transformations of the bones shouldn’t be changed.