OK, well, it's been months now since I bought ALL of these great looking programs, ALL the Pro versions of course hehe
Anyway, I still can't seem to figure out ANY "normal or BASIC/SIMPLE way" to take a perfectly good bone rig, one that already has some basic motions such as (duh) walk and a few others, and put them in an object that is very close to the same type of object that I want the bones from, i.e. quad legged to another quad legged character.

I don't really feel much like recreating the wheel each and every time I need to make yet another quad animal walk around.

I downloaded DAZ just the other day, in the hopes that IT might??? be able to do that very thing, but I couldn't find a way to do it. I have Poser, couldn't find anything in that that would let me do that, iClone 5.5 Pro, Hmmmmm... couldn't seem to find ANY way to do it in there, so of course, I bought the xChange 5.5 Pro version and I have to say I guess I'm just really really stupid or something, but, going by alllllllll the searches in the manuals, ref mans, searching even right on this forum, and nothing I do seems to bring up the topic of transferring a perfectly good, and already animated set of bone rigs from one of my own home made objects, made in like Lightwave or whatever other 3D app I feel like using that I work with, like modo.

I try and convert things, but, I can't figure out, or maybe it's, can't find a way to do what I would think would (by now) be what should be a relatively basic procedure to do?

So, after all the laughing at me or what ever, hehehe, maybe someone can tell me where I am going wrong and what I am missing???

Pleassseeee???
I'm beginning to loose it here Bwah hahaha

In iClone I searched the manual and so on, and the thing seems to have ZERO way to let you do anything remotely what I am looking to do? Please SHOW me WHERE, don't just tell me it's there somewhere, please Haha, actual real info would help, but when I looked at the animation tab, nope, nothing about bones, not in the setup, rigging, exporting, etc did I find the subject of bones, much less duplicating there for use in another object.

xChange, same thing from what I've seen so far, so I'm like, wow, for a conversion software, it felt like to me there wasn't all that many options to actually DO these things I am talking about?

Same with that DAZ software, which to be honest, was kinda the one program I would of been for sure could do these kinds of things, even though that was also the very last program I finally downloaded and looked into to see IF it could do any of these things for me..??
Sadly, so far I am still stuck.. Grrrrr LOL

I love all the quad animals and other such cool creatures.
Help me to take the short cut to get the working bone rigs and put them into my own animals, please thank you.

...................................md

if you looking fo a easy way for rigging, I'm sorry 3d xchange can not do that for you

3D xchange retargeting biped bones from your rigged Character to the iClone system.

So that you can use the iClone motion, facial motion features and the motioneditors to any imported rigged biped Model. .

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liebe Grüße vidi

meet us here

Hi mdunakin,


First of all, welcome to the forum!!


yep, it's an adventure many of us have taken! lol - what you are asking for, is simple in concept, but actually an adventure to do because only a limited amount of softwares are capable of importing the rig ( without breaking it! ) and reskinning it to a new mesh.

The easiest answer is maya / 3DS max - but it comes with a big price tag and a ton of tutorials to review, and even then you would need max 2010 to get the reallusion plug in for max to bring it back into the iclone ik system.

The little known answer is Shade 3D - as it will import your character with it's rig, it's a japanese company ( software is in english ) and they have a serious lack of tutorials to perform the process. - and the program / workflow in Shade 3D looks simple, but is far from straight forward. The Shade 3D for unity program is free, and has this look like it's easy to work, but when you start pushing buttons, it makes no sense lol - for example, adding bones is easy enough to figure out, but they turn invisible while rigging over the mesh!! lol

It's not as easy as import your rig, and replacing the mesh, as you have to re-align the bones and possibly redo the weight maps.

Daz is not good for this because it doesn't play well with importing iclone bones - so you will ultimately have to create a new rig.

Blender fbx import still needs more work, so you can import your rig and model, but it will come in non-functional - now if the rig will still work, I can't say because blender is not a straight forward program

Further you have the dilema of bringing this back into iclone, as 3DX5 only imports bi-peds ...so you would have to rig your animal as a human to re-import it .....or simply re-import it with bones as a prop and animate it fk - now if the animal motions will work on a bi-ped retarget , I can't say because I haven't tried it .... it might - simply because of the naming convention - but i can't say there wont be any caveats in this approach.

The real biggest problem is every software has their own take on how to handle 3D, and sometimes little issues / or functions one software does different or leaves out, breaks the pipeline. The few softwares that can do it the way you imagine, are expensive and require intensive training.

Good luck, and keep us posted!

Cheers

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simply WRONG !!!, or have you see a DAZ EZ facial rig button in DAZ studio ?




-------------------------------------------------------------------
liebe Grüße vidi

meet us here

Hey, thanx for both of your replies, Vidi and planetstardragon.

I specially like everything you brought up, planetstardragon, which believe it or not, almost everything you said, yep!, things I thought of and tested out too Hahahaha
But!, it at least helped me in a great way, by pretty much confirming a lot of things I had already basically decided was how some things were, and the other would be, hey, sooo.. it's not just me then? Hahahahaha

But seriously, except for the Max program, I only have a pretty old version and haven't upgraded since my animation times have changed a lot over the years. No point.
But a good portion of suggestions you just laid out, along with the real life facts about the hell I will face in and with ost any of these programs, I've kinda am at that stage right now trying to see if there still could be a method I could pull off, or with a lot less steps and work I mean?

I, like you, am a problem solver.
This is what I do and in fact that is mostly was
what I ended up getting paid for when I last did paid jobs.
I love solving problems, so, this one IS a challenge,
I just didn't nowhere near expect it to be, not even remotely close to this tough LOL

But, we (an animation friend of mine, and I) might??? have a paying job in the
not to distant future, and I/we simply can NOT have to rebuild the wheel
every time we want to make a different creature.

And what I mean by that isn't the having to re-align bone joints or anything like that,
that part is a breeze, couple of few minutes if you are at least as fast as a normal rigging person, and I am.
I just want several basic bone rigs that I can save and load into ANY other creature
and get things up and running as quickly as is possible, with as little as having
to redo things every-single-time-ugh LOL

Anyway, since I am far too stuburn to ever give up, I will find some
(at least) half way decent method/system to do this all some how?
When I do, trust me, I will let you know how things worked out.

Sound good?

OK, thanx again.....................md

OK, sees that I posted my last message befor noticing that there wewre two more replis happening during the time it took me to type out my message LOL

So, what you mentioned about the Skinning/Mesh stuff, yeah, I already knew about that part, and to be honest DID NOT like that whole sceme of things and actually felt like that is almost a slap to anyone that wants to do 3D, meaning, sheesh, I am forced into using the same vertex count!!!!!?????

When I read that a while back, while going through tutorials and such, I was like, no!, I refuse to except that LOL
There HAS TO BE SOME way for me to do the bones and repaint the new object with the weights that will match, since that is what the manual states in one of these programs, but, that would be easy for me, IF they let me do all that in which ever program I want to????
Orrr... at least in any kind of program that will let that step be relatively easy and not like some apps I've bought or have seen in the past that you find out they are very unfriendly to the user.
You all know the kind I mean Hehehe

Anyway, this is just one critter, not fully completed, but you get the drift.
Other quad animals.

............md

BTW, I forgot to thank you for the Welcome to the Forum comment, so thanx

I will now be, or as best I can be, a more regular here and hopefully in the near future be able to help others, as I have done over the past twenty+ years with other 3D programs I have mastered.

And iClone IMHO, looks to me to be one of thee funnest to play with programs out there, thus the reasons I bought all of the iClone programs and the Pro versions of each, cuz I want to get fully into them.

Can I ask one question more, if you all won't mind?
I bought several premade animals, the killer Toto dog, German Shepard dog and that awesome 7 Headed Red Dragon.
Figured these would be really great to help get me started learning about the whole "mesh" between all of these programs and how they all can interact with each other, plus other programs outside the basic brands setup/system, i.e. Daz, Poser, yadda yadda.

Anyway, my question is, can ya all just tell me which software these people used to actually add, edit, and most importantly, RE-edit a boned mesh object, such as Toto???

Did they build it in Daz?
If so, was that person able to later go back and re-edit the dog if they felt like it wasn't quite right?
And if so, no matter which program they used to build the object, I just want to know which one AND were they able to RE-edit their boned rigged object?

Cuzzzz... if this can be done, then I know already that there are 'other', usually more hidden methods, that can be done to get the results that a modeler/rigging would need NEED to be able to do and work with?
If that all made sense? Hehe

thanx again all...............md

P.S. Umm.. how come that thing where my name is for the forum, states I'm a newbie? LOL
I think it is just a robot going by, newbie in terms of I am new to the forum, right?
Cuz otherwise, I've been doing 3D professionally for..well since `87 when I first got started on my Amiga 500 and Turbo Silver Hahaha Awesome software for back then too hehe

......md

honestly, that will have to be a trial and error and a personal choice as to how you want to do your workflow.

one simple solution would be to recreate the bones in another software like blender, then just import new meshes to it.

One solution I had considered in the past was rebuilding /recreating the iclone bone system in messiah, - copying the bone count / placement and naming convention - in hopes that iclone will adopt it back into it's ik system. The problem with messiah is that their fbx doesn't function properly and damages multiple UV models, making this solution moot.

I'm planning on getting carrara because it can also do this, and is straight forward, it has a great community of artists and a nice collection of tutorials.

Shade can also do this, as well as import iclone bones directly - i haven't the patience to sit down for months experimenting due to their lack of tutorials and help files. Too bad too, shade does some beautiful renders.

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Wow, I actually never thought that program was weven still alive!??? Hahaha
No offense to anyone that may still use that and love it or something I mean no harm
Just, I still have the brand nw thing in it's case and serial number and all that, but, I have far more serious 3D apps that are proffessional apps.
So, I never bothered with it.


OK, news update thus far:
I can import the Toto dog with what could be bones and things, into Blener, just fine, and my older Max, v9 or ,11, I can't recall.
Anyway, was quite happy to see at least that happen, as that means there ARE things giving me some clues.

Right now I am going to workwith messiah and also my LW 11.6.3 and I have a few conversion apps.
Real small, but, if they can do the job, cool.

And lastly, yeah!!!, I really like your thoughts on doing that whole little method/s of "attempting to" Haha hehe see IF it can really be done like you mention about the whole naming convention, which, in theory, I'd say, most...??? might or should be pretty easy to rename and so on and also the rotations and pivot starting axis and localised to world and so on if needed rename all the joint XYZ positions and likie taht, if needed and that might need t happen?
I will let you know what I find.

Again, thanx, you really are thinking in the same levels that I like to search through for solutions... what I mean, you give great, info that shows you've been there, done that and so on, which for me and everyong else folling this thread, we are all getting something from this.
And what yoiu say so far, all makes good sense and I know some of the apps you say you never really had the time to learn, so maybe that will help me??? Hahaha

K, thanx................md