since this thread closed http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=383794 i opened a new one since i need help. my problem is that the exporter doesnt always work. most of the time it just ends up with an empty scene inside the DirectXviewer. is there anyone who knows what is causing this? i've tried a lot of different things on what may cause this problem but i just cant find out what it is. so is there a list of rules you have to follow to get it to work or some document that may give an idea of what is causing the problem? (i'm using dxSDK from june 2006) thanks in advance.

The exporter works relatively fine if you've installed it correctly. Have you followed all of the suggestions and guidelines that I and everyone else in my stickied thread said? You're only trying to export polys and not nurbs or subdivs, right? You might want to mess around with the exporter options as well.

yeah i've followed and completed all the steps.

yes, it is a polygonal surface i am trying to export, along with a skeleton with animation on it.

i heard someone said something about it didnt like ik-handles so i've tried to make my rig, animate, bake the simulation to the bones and then removed all iks, constraints and everything that is not skeleton or mesh.
but it still doesnt work. (argh!!)


everything went fine until i started with the rigging of the character.
what are the limitations for rigging? any max numbers of bones or something like that?

Are you using smooth or rigid binding? Has every single poly been bound?

Hey, I'm doing this together with this guy.

We're using smooth binding, and yes, all bones that are being used have verts bound to them. We are using "temporary" bones, when rigging, (like the _end of the chains), but they are removed before exporting, and they are not even included in the smooth bind.

Something to add:

If we remove EVERYTHING! in the scene, up to the point where there is only a mesh left, and do a OSS, delete all history and everything, we still cannot export the model.

If we export it as an OBJ, then create a new scene, and THEN export the mesh (since only the mesh gets transferred), then it works fine.

But this way we will loose the rig, skinning and animations.

yo
this is so gay im about to go crazy.

check this out
http://home.no/robgraf/test.mb

why wont it work?
its smooth binded with 3 influences. ive tried to export even w/o the control objects (locators and nurbs circles) but i still cant get it to export properly.

i'm getting so pissed and our time is running out. about to hit a deadline next week.
if you got an idea, please help!

thanks in advance!

Try some of the following-
Triangulate your mesh
Polygon-cleanup on your meshes
File-Optimize Project
Hypershade-Edit-Delete Unused nodes (should be done by optimization)
Delete all your Hypershade nodes, then create a new material and use that
Delete All History, then go into your Outliner and delete everything that's not a mesh or bone.

Those are all I can think of. If worse comes to worse, can't you just export as OBJ, import, re-skin and export?

thanks, we've tried that before with no good result. you see the problem lies in the rig, not the mesh.
but we've tried removing all layers, re rigging. first we thought it was the mesh so we actually did export as obj, then imported it again and skinned again.

however, in my desperate hunt for finding the problem i've been exporting after each step in building a new rig. but when the rig was finished and i was going to see if it could be animated the animation didnt show.
the problem seems to be that it just wont rebuild the scene. it says " rebuilding scene" in the script editor but i dont think it does that.
when i load the exported file that isnt really rebuilt, i get nothing.

so the exporter fooled me, it didnt export at all, it must have shown an old build of the scene because now its empty again.