UDK Import Test Issues

          Over the past week I have been working on the sculpting of my character within ZBrush, and I will post a blog entry soon to show the current state that it is in. For now the work on sculpting has been stopped as I need to focus my priorities on producing what is required for a successful alpha presentation that will soon be upon myself and David. With that being said I began to test the process of importing my character/rig into UDK and whether animation carries across from Maya to UDK correctly.

I began by selecting the skeleton hierarchy and character mesh and exporting into a .FBX format. In doing so Maya presented me with a few errors on export, errors which I have seen before, signalling that the meshes have multiple transform nodes that UDK might not accept. I tried importing this .FBX into UDK and it failed ('Import Failed' with no indication as to why). I figured it was to be expected because of the transform nodes, and so delete the character's non-deformer history which usually resolves the problem, however for this particular case it did not, and to this date I still don't understand why. I wasn't too concerned however because I had come across the same issue in my Game Development module, and knew a work around for it; I made two versions of the rig, one is the completed rig with all the splines, IKs and control curves etc., and one that was a 'clean' version with only the bones and mesh, no constraints or tools on it of any kind. All I'd have to do when it comes to creating and importing the animations would be to animate on the 'complete' skeleton, bake the animations to its bones and then transfer the baked information across to the 'clean' rig via the use of a MEL script.

I tried importing the 'clean' rig into UDK and still I was presented with 'Import Failed'. After hours of looking for answers on the internet and trying various methods I decided to try importing the simplest of rigs to determine whether it was my rig, Maya or UDK that is causing the problem. I created a single bone chain, skinned a sphere to it and tried importing, which again presented as a failed import. So I had presumed it must be a UDK issue, however after trouble shooting I tried the same test of importing the simplest of rigs but this time exported it using Maya 2013 version, and not the 2014 version which I had been using. This worked, and so it also worked for importing my 'clean' rig too. I can only presume that there has been a recent update for Maya 2014's FBX exporter that is causing the issue. Either way, the importing now works and the rig behaves the way I intended it to.

          I now have to focus on creating the alpha-level block out animations ready for the alpha presentation in week 7.