• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

MSFS Animation issues

Messages
134
Country
italy
Hello gents! I am trying to import a rigged character with custom animations within blender.
The char is rigged, scale is 1 on all, but once I do import it into the game:
1. the starting pose is the T pose instead of the one that it should be
1603138533616.png


2. The character distorts and bends instead of playing the animation. keyframes seems OK, what's weird is that it seems to try to apply the actual armature animation on the T pose instead of the starting pose.
1603138635709.png


How do I solve this?

Thanks in advance ;)
 
Messages
372
Country
austria
you baked the complete animation into keyframes? so that you can remove the armature and export everything without he armature.
as far as i know it is the armature that is causing the problems.
 
Messages
134
Country
italy
Hi @Mikea.at ! Thanks for the suggestion!
I did a quick Google about it (I am a total newbie) and I found out about Rigid Body baking and shapefile baking. The first one isn't the case but if you meant the second one, it's a bit of an issue. I'd have to add keyframes for basically each interpolation bit since from what I read shapefile anima doesn't have any interpolation. It sounds a bit odd to me also that there is no way to preserve the armature for further use.
What I did was to create an NLA track and export the model giving it a loop animation with that NLA track set on loop. If that's what you meant, I did that but at that point removing the armature is not possible
 

Vitus

Resource contributor
Messages
1,480
Country
newzealand
Shapekeys are not (yet?) supported by MSFS though.
 
Messages
134
Country
italy
Shapekeys are not (yet?) supported by MSFS though.
So another possible solution is gone. I tried importing a premade animation which is supposed to be "game ready", and it behaves basically the same, or better, worse. The character gets spaghettified and do some oblivious movements. I really don't get how it can be and armature can't be an issue in its concept since I saw a lot of animated characters ingame. Might be worth to understand how to import it as a SimObject instead of a scenery model with animations. But also in that case I really have no idea where to start, even tho I just need to add ONE animation. If anybody got a good tutorial for SimObjects or knows a quick how-to I'd be very grateful, thank you for your Support and patience guys :)


P.s. and to me, as a noobie so I might be totally wrong, the issue is not within the armature itself since it seems that it's animated correctly ingame, but in the mesh or in some setting between the armature and the mesh
 

Vitus

Resource contributor
Messages
1,480
Country
newzealand
I haven't done any skinned-mesh animations yet, so I can't really be of help in this. However, I do use an armature to animate the gear on my aircraft and that works just fine. Make sure that you have your transforms reset - specifically the scale transform. Also, I'm not quite sure if you need to add the mesh object itself to the NLA of the animation you're triggering, or if it's enough for the armature to have that NLA.
It's also possible that there's a bug in the Blender exporter that's causing this - as said, I haven't used skinned meshes yet. o_O
 
Messages
372
Country
austria
just to keep up, that is the format bevore exporting to msfs? because after the export it is .gltf?
 

Christian Bahr

Resource contributor
Messages
951
Country
germany
It may be due to a limitation of the bone system. Each individual bone can only control a limited number of vertices. And there are a limited number of bones linked together. But how many linked bones or how many vertices a single bone can control, I don't know, it's not written in the SDK. It is therefore advisable to keep things as simple as possible in the beginning. In other words, few bones and few polygons. How many polys does your model have, is it more than 10,000?
 
Messages
134
Country
italy
Models should be 20K polygons, I might try to reduce the polys but I am afraid it has something to do with the way Mixamo exports the models and the rig. Plus I don't know if it's due to polygons, because instead of getting the model posed and having distortion since then, the model starts from a T pose (which is nowhere in the animation) and gets distorted from there to weird shapes (of course, because the armature moves correctly but the mesh isn't placed as it should)
 

Christian Bahr

Resource contributor
Messages
951
Country
germany
I don't think Mixamo is the reason the 3-D model is skewed. It will most likely be due to the import or export, more precisely it is probably due to your import/export settings in Blender. I can give you a working FBX file so you can run tests with it ;)
 
Messages
134
Country
italy
I don't think Mixamo is the reason the 3-D model is skewed. It will most likely be due to the import or export, more precisely it is probably due to your import/export settings in Blender. I can give you a working FBX file so you can run tests with it ;)
Aight! Might be a good way to look for a solution! Tbh I did try mostly all possible combinations in the export phase, so it oughta be the importing which has some hidden corner I can't see.
Maybe trying with your working fbx and seeing the differences could somehow help me out :)
 
Messages
134
Country
italy
BTW This is a short screen capture of what happens when exporting. I did all the procedure back, and exported the model. The animation as you can se starts from the T Pose.
Here instead, the actual untouched animation.
Just moved to an NLA track, and exported as you would for animated objects



So, we made some progress @Christian Bahr!
I added a T-Pose frame at the very beginning of the animation aaaaand. This was a good workaround, even tho I don't want it to start with a T-Pose each time :D Now I gotta figure out what causes this. This means it is neither the import nor the export phase




Any idea?
 
Last edited:
Messages
372
Country
austria
Does the mash has to be inside of the armature hierarchy in the blender outliner?

Btw. Nice animation for a "newbie" ;)
 
Messages
134
Country
italy
LOL as I said above it's a Mixamo animation, I ain't into animating and rigging at all but a few "let this interpolate how it wants" :D
 
Messages
134
Country
italy
Does the mash has to be inside of the armature hierarchy in the blender outliner?

Btw. Nice animation for a "newbie" ;)
In my case it is, but still hands are slightly over scaled. Something is wrong in the model and animation setup it seems, I just don't get why. Both the need of a T-pose frame and the overscale hands make no sense
 

Christian Bahr

Resource contributor
Messages
951
Country
germany
Very nice that you have come a little further in the meantime. I've just sent you an FBX file and a Photoshop file as a PM. It's a dancing woman, the animation is about 545 frames long. So that you know how it looks in the 3-D software 3ds Max, I recorded a short video:


EDIT
This is what it looks like in the P3D:

 
Last edited:
Top