Hi there

i´m starting to plan a project, which involves getting a custom character with it´s own animation into UE3 from XSI…

I heard several people saying, that this won´t be possible with xsi, as there are huge problems with skeletal meshes from xsi to ue3 (twisted bones, weird axis, etc.)

Are there any other oppinions? is there a basic workflow on how to approach that?

Any hints and tipps are welcome…

Custom character and animation from XSI are totally do able.
At one time there was some issue with mirrored bones with negative scaling. But I believe this is not an issue any more.
If you have any specific questions or are caught up on a particular part please post here maybe I can help you out.
/Jentzen

great to hear that…

i will try to get myself into it and ask, if i get stuck…

So I am working with this same subject now, and here are a few things that I am running into:

1. XSI rig from biPed guide, does not want to import right. Seems like the problem you mentioned with the mirrored bones not working right. The right side of the character, the arms, comes in with the bones inverted. The scale on these in XSI are -1. Probably the root of the problem. But I’m not versed enough to go in a fix that part of the rig.

2. aformention rig, also, some bones don’t import in. It goes from the chest plate bone, to the sholders. then chest plate bone to the wrist. The two arm bones are missing and a few leg bones and forget about the feet. It does import stuff, just not everything.

3. I’ve tried to download the “free” rig from this link:
http://www.highend3d.com/xsi/downloads/character_rigs/4905.html
It just crashes. And I don’t know how to resize it to fit my custom character without breaking the weighting after enveloping.

So I am left it seems with creating my own rig. Because I can see that unreal is importing the meshes and the weights and everything. I just haven’t managed to build a rig that exports from XSI into Unreal proper.

Is there a proper method to rig to make the transistion painless? Anyone whom has done it sucessfully, can you give me a hand?
Thanks

j.r.

I went back to see what was happening. And this is what I found that works (so far).

I use the biped Guide to layout what I want my rig to look like. It’s easy for someone like me that doesn’t know how to create all the complex constraints and whatnot.

When you go to “create rig from biped guide”, make sure to set up a Shadow Rig.

I set it to: SI3D Skeleton. This creates a rig on top of the standard XSI rig, that is constrained to it. Also, select, create unified skeleton and rig model. This Shadow Rig seems to have the proper hierarchy for unreal. Envelope everything to the shadow rig. But you can use the same control objects of the XSI rig to drive your animation.

Any luck?

I was able to bring my own custom rig into unreal. Just for those of you who dont know yet, this are some things to watch out for.

* Whatever set up you choose to do. Make sure that you have at least 2 groups. A deformer group and a rig group. In the end ActorX only export geometry that has deformers influencing them. It wont export anything else.

* Apply a material that points to an external file.
When doing this make sure that on the ActorX window you have “All skin type selected” otherwise xsi will crash.

As far as custom animations go.  The set up is the same as using the max or maya actor x. So look for tutorials on that.

Is pretty straight forward tho, u export. Then import your mesh into unreal, and assign those animations to your mesh. Let me know if you need more info on this.

Well I’ve been fooling around with the rigging yesterday and had some issues with the skeleton. Seems when I export the feet won’t follow along as they should.

As suggested above I used the biped setup with shadow rig (SI|3d) and it worked. Obviously I was sitting there - “but why?”. So I went ahead and check the skeleton out. The first thing that striked me as odd was that the default xsi skeleton and the shadow rig had different bone hierarchy. The bone effector in the default setup is under the root so I moved it to the end of the chain and did the same with everything else. Lo and behold the rig I made by hand worked.

So my question is simply - will changing the bone hierarchy screw with xsi since it’s not the default setup or is it totally fine to do? Haven’t really had any time to test it out and am pretty new to the whole rig thing.