Does max has anything like a pre rotation value, to zero out values. More specificly I want them to be zero’d out when importing in motionbuilder. I offcourse know about the freeze transform options (list controllers) but they don’t stick when importing in motionbuilder, that’s a max specific thing.
In Maya and XSI you have these prerotation (matrices!?) options. Exporting from maya makes the prerotation stick (you can find them back in the prerotation values in properties), from max I can’t find anyway to do it, they don’t show up in motionbuilder… any ideas!?
Is Max more limited in the default PRS controller (matrix) then Maya or XSI… I thought it would be the same, but appearantly that’s not the case, Max seems limited… or am I missing something obvious!?
-Johan
If I understand the question correctly, can’t you just use reset transform?
No that doesn’t work (u can’t reset bones) and it’s not really the way.
You see there’s a special pre-rotate value you can enter that can counter the local value of the object. This is what I want, when I export from max I want this values. Nothing I tried worked. In maya there’s a similar feature, XSI has it aswell and it looks like those packages have an extra tm matrix in the object, or a more complex one… not a 4×3…
Maybe I should post in the maya or FBX forum!?
-Johan
Sounds like you’d have to work out the object-offset matrix values to the node transform matrix. What about resetting the transform?
What value are you talking about? the bones rotation when you first create it? you can always reset its transform. $.transform = matrix3 [1,0,0] [0,1,0] [0,0,1] $.transform.row4
The problem is not I don’t understand what’s happening (well most parts of it), the problem is the fbx exporter. It doesn’t export list controllers, also object offset transforms aren’t the same really, at least not when exporting is done making fbx of it.
And I’m still wondering if Maya and XSI have different matrix systems than Max…
-Johan
You know the object-offset matrix is what keeps the object relative to its pivot(node transform). about the world space (inverse) right? So I’m guessing you dont want to change this stuff.
Why dont you just collapse the controllers down to key frames? You can do this with any controller type.
Hi Eek,
Thanks for trying to help but I think you’re not understanding the issue, did you check the screenshot? Motionbuilder has a way to do prerotation… resets the local controller to 0,0,0 excactly like a freeze transform in max. My issue is that I want to EXPORT from max with this frozen/pre transform setting and that it appears in Motionbuilder. That way I don’t have to manually reset 80+ bones each time I import in Motionbuilder, with it’s really poor scripting. Maya has this abillity. And I see in XSI there’s a feature like that too for an object. It looks like object offset but it really isn’t, since it at least looks like it’s hooked in the PRS controller or SRT as they call in in XSI… Thus making me question is Max’s transform matrix more limited then XSI’s or Maya’s transform matrix…
I’ll post my guestion in the fbx forum on the area and see if I can figure out a way to make the export without resorting to maya and breaking the link in my Max/motionbuilder pipeline…
Thanx for thinking along though, much appreciated!!!
-Johan
It’s a really stupid way to do things but might do what you want – what if you wrote a simple script to go through each bone and put a null between it and its parent – have the null aligned to the child bone, with the parent bone as the nulls parent and the child bone as its child – this way the bone is always using 0,0,0 as its rotation value and it’s the null that stores the offset from the parent – admittedly you’re adding in loads of extra stuff and probably more issues but it might work for some cases?
I thought of it myself too, but motionbuilder breaks if you don’t have the right hierarchy/naming… :hmm:…
Then I would maybe put in a python script in motionbuilder to reset rotations there, but python is very tedious in MB…
Thanks though!
-Johan