Animation to .3ds

[Herthoren]

Hi!

 

I'm a total newbie at 3d editing and hopefully won't have to get too deep into it, however I've been searching for a solution for this problem really intensively for a pretty long time, and I can't understand why I'm not finding the solution.

 

Using 3ds max 2009 (trial).

 

 

I have objects with skin animations, need to export them in .3ds format ANIMATED.

 

Found out .3ds doesn't support those, so seized baking plugins, finally got one working, it can bake to vertex animation or morph object seamlessly, the

 

animations are fine, the skin modifiers are gone (actually all modifiers for the vertex one) but THE .3ds FILE STILL WON'T STORE THE ANIMATION.

The model just stands there as it does on the frame the import was done from.

 

Tried Point Cache too but it simply didn't work. Watched the tutorial, did exactly as the Autodesk guy in the movie, but no matter what I try when I click on

 

the "disable modifiers below" button, the model won't continue to animate. Anyways, I doubt 3ds will support Point cache if it doesn't support morphing and

 

vertex animations.

 

 

Just to make sure it supports any kind of animation, I tried simple keyframe based ones and they worked.

However I don't know how to convert the skin animations into keyframe animations, but it must be possible.

 

So doesn't anyone knows a plugin that can convert my animations (skin or vertex or morph) into KEYFRAME ANIMATIONS? So the plugin should just store the

 

positions of all polygons, and sets them at every frame (there are no textures or particle stuff or anything)?

Or knows any other way to get my animations into a .3ds file?

 

Thank you very much

[dean@pikcells]

.3ds format is a pretty old format, and wont store animations. other file formats might.

 

is there any reason you need to export to .3ds? what do you plan on doing with the exported file?

 

Dean

[Herthoren]

Thank you for replying.

Ideally, I want to export to Swift 3d.

(Actually, I need the final 2d animation in XAML, Swift 3D can render into that format)

 

I checked and noticed that .3ds does store simple timeline animation, so in theory, one could just make a 3ds export from every frame, import and merge them, and set the appropriate models to invisible at every frame they shouldn't be seen. Well it's impossible in practice with 23000+ frames and a lot of models, but I suppose in theory it could be done (I can export the different states of the models, the 3ds file will always contain the state they had at the frame I was on when I hit export).

 

Swift 3D supports: .3ds (along with animation - checked)

Not sure how well: .eps, .ai, .dxf, .dxb (autocad)

Edited March 17, 2009 by Herthoren

[MrCAD]

well exporting a 3ds frame by frame would be a mess...I suggest you need this for good results..the 3ds max plugin version is available for swift3d which would sort out all the hassles

 

http://www.erain.com/products/plug-ins/

 

Meher

[Herthoren]

Unfortunately, Swift 3D 3dsmax plugin will only render into swf, and all the swf2xaml tools I tried so far only created a sequence of bitmaps from the swf file then played it in xaml. I need vector format xaml animation.