3ds Max - Animation

This tutorial has been adapted from the community generated Animation Wiki.

Usually, disabling baking is best. However, certain plugins don’t work with FBX (e.g. Character Animation Toolkit) and should be baked.

CAT rigs are supported but have to be exported a certain way. In order to export animation that is made using CAT (Character Animation Toolkit), make sure you do the following:

• BEFORE you try to export make sure you are NOT displaying any bones as a box. Select the object/bone, right-click and go to Object Properties. Display as Box causes an FBX export error.
  
  
• When you export your animated model you only need to select the Model not the bones. Any CAT bones that are skinned to the mesh will be automatically exported.
• In the FBX Settings, you must check Convert Deforming Dummies to Bones. Otherwise it will cause an error and your bones will display as geometry. Users found the following FBX settings to be optimal:
  
  
• Don't use points or helpers as bones. It is not supported and causes missing animated geometry. But if you can't avoid it then you will have to export it "twice". For some reason the "convert deforming dummies to bones" option at export doesn't work. So first export it to FBX as you would normally do. Then import it back to 3ds Max for converting every point and helper to bones and export it out again to FBX.

Morph Compound Objects are not supported because they are not exported in FBX.

Multiple Takes

Users DigiBuild and Yannick Deharo have shared a workflow (in 3ds Max 2016) and some tips to export multiple takes as separate animations on Sketchfab:

1. Click on the GameExporter (where File and Edit menus are lined up).
2. From the Dialog, go to the Animation Clips tab.
3. From here you can slice your animation from the scene.
4. If you need, you can modify your mesh export settings with the cog at the bottom right
5. Whatever the temporal information of your takes, the "static pose" will always be the "0" frame. You can choose to set the T position or another pose to customize it.
6. Before exporting, make sure that the timeline that contains all animations is visible from the beginning of the first take the last frame of the last one.
7. Avoid spaces or special characters in take names.

This will export animations as well as mesh.

Another option is this plugin (not free). Some notes from user protofactor:

• The trial version only works up to 3ds Max 2014
• The paid version works in 3ds Max 2015.
• You must export the "take001" animation for the export to work correctly. You can delete it from Sketchfab after uploading.

Troubleshooting tips from our team

The first thing to do is to ensure that Show Warning Manager is checked in UI dropdown so that

You will be aware if something went wrong during the export. For example you will see in this log if something is not supported in FBX export and is not (or partially) exported.

After that, you need to check what is globally used in your 3ds Max scene and what is actually animating your model. 3ds Max has some features and tools to animate models and skeletons, that are not supported in FBX. It means that if you export your scene as FBX, these modifiers and their effects will be lost in the ouput FBX.

To avoid this, you may need to use (in some cases) the Bake Animation option in FBX Export settings. The goal of this option is to convert almost all animation to simple keyframes animation so that everything can be packed in FBX and read by other plugins.

Obviously, ensure that Animation and Skin/Morph exports are enabled in Deformers dropdown.

Also, note that Point Cache animations is not currently supported on Sketchfab (as for constraints).

Known issue:

You might see that the baking makes your model vibrate during animation. The cause is not clear, but it comes from the 3ds Max baking function. If you experience this issue, try to change the Step parameter in Bake Animation for something higher than 1. To give you an example, using 10 instead of 1 should be ok.