Solid Snake/ImportingSkeletalMeshesIntoRoboBlitz

How to import skeletal meshes into RoboBlitz

Introduction

It seemes that importing skeletal meshes into Roboblitz is a bit of a problem. Either the editor crashes, or meshes get garbled or something just goes wrong. I've done a few things and it seems that I am able to import skeletal meshes and animations (PSK / PSA) from 3DSMax6 + CS into RoboBlitz. I did try a mesh that was exported with ActorX in Maya, and it seemed to work fine. This tutorial is written for users who have either 3DSMax or Maya. This tutorial also assumes you know how to export meshes/animations using ActorX, importing and general usage of UnrealED 4.0. There are lots of tutorials for those things (Using UnrealED 4.0 is more or less the same as UnrealED 3.0, or otherwise you can just figure it out [it honestly ain't hard])

Setting up 3DSMax 6.0 and ActorX

So these are the properties you've got to set. Its quite important to set it as 'all skin-type'. It seems when I export it using say 'all textured', while Roboblitz imports the mesh fine, but when importing animations, the animations did not work. So I export all my meshes using the above setup (with the exception of names etc).

RoboBlitz v1.1 importing issues

The second tricky part, is that if you have RoboBlitz 1.1, I hope you kept a copy of RoboBlitz 1.0. Initially when I bought RoboBlitz (from Digital River), I went and tried out the editor. Coincedently I tried importing some PSK files I had lying around and they imported just fine along with the animations. However, when I upgraded my copy to version 1.1 ... I found that when I imported the same files I would just get garbage as shown in the picture above. So the obvious trick to all this, is to import the skeletal mesh and the animation data using RoboBlitz 1.0. I have no idea why, and its really just an observed effect sort of thing, but I have not been able to successfully import using RoboBlitz 1.1 at this stage. Maybe someone will figure out why... but for now, there are two different versions of RoboBlitz on my HDD for this specific purpose.

And thats all there is to it. After that, you can load the package you created in RoboBlitz 1.0 in RoboBlitz 1.1 (The reason why you would want to use 1.1 is so you can also use your own unreal script). That wasn't so hard now was it?

Final results

Discussion

Solid Snake: Side note: The Collada import path for Skeletal meshes exported from Maya into Roboblitz 1.1 seems to work fine. First import the DAE file and check the "import as skeletal mesh" box. Then you can "Import Collada Animation" through the AnimSet Editor.

SuperApe: Woot!

Category Tutorial