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Blender Quest for Animated People - distorted animation in MSFS

Strange. There are only minor differences in the animation XML code for these objects. The Boss has a (completely pointless) "typeparam2" in his Animation tag, whereas none of my flags or wind socks use that parameter. You might try deleting that parameter and see if it helps. Maybe this parameter has been deprecated and now breaks animations.

Otherwise, The Boss is just simpler: he does not use either the AnimGraph or the ModelBehaviors constructs, which are essential to the flags and wind socks. Perhaps the new MSFS version requires a SimObject animation to use these more advanced constructs?

I guess the last thing worth trying would be to see if the animation for The Boss works if configured as a simple scenery object rather than a SimObject.
 
This update is a disaster :(
The bing servers etc everything is offline.

I have to completely reinstall ...:mad:
Thank you very much @trfsd for all your sharing ;)
 
Well that sucks but very typical of every update so far :( Hopefully there will be a workaround

Kev
Are you using the code provided by @Christian Bahr ?

Because I noticed one thing. Standard bone animations seems to work, BUT once you put environmental variables, it stops working. One model of mine had the same behaviour BUT another guy, @Kiartz has his sliding door (bone animated) working.

So I'm pretty sure that if you remove the Environmental Variable from your object, it will work nicely ;)

This would also explain why animated flags don't work either! I got a good feeling that we found the issue, and the workflow discovered by @trfsd is still valid
 
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i tried now
and I confirm that with v.1.17.3 it works great 👍
I created as a SceneryObject

great credit to @trfsd for having found the way and great honor for sharing it, with precise instructions 🙌

I kneel and make a prayer of thanks for you 😀 👇👇👇

 
And I struggle in saying that, the same didn't work for me. So Environmental variables are not the cause, or not the only cause. We should file a report to Asobo, and ask for directions since the same thing @614NLV did resulted in a T-Pose for me :/
 
I'm not a member of the tester program and I cannot test it with the new SU
you can. To see if the animations work, we don't need to use variables.
so just make a simple scenaryobject

as I already told you on discord, just try, here is the file ready
 
Here's what is working for me:

1) Export a T-Pose with no animation from Blender. OBJ or FBX works. Make sure the standard materials are used.
2) Upload that T-Pose to mixamo.
3) Choose an animation, and use a 2 chain finger skeleton. I'm not sure if the other skeletons work but I suspect they will.
4) Place the chin, wrist, etc..
5) download your new animated FBX file.

I then use FBX2glTF-windows-x64.exe with this example command:

Code:
FBX2glTF-windows-x64 MyRemyDefeated.fbx --verbose --anim-framerate bake30 >myRemyDefeated.txt

This produces a gltf and textures in the -out folder it creates. The BIN file will be named buffer.bin and needs to be renamed as MyRemyDefeated_out (for example), The glTF needs to be edited with a text editor. Find "buffer.bin" and change to "MyRemyDefeated.bin" (for example).

This result can then be directly used in the sim.

Don't re-edit the gltf in Blender, as it will be deformed in the sim.

FBX2glTF

I find you can't use the stock characters in mixamo. You can download a T-Pose, and then delete the animation in Blender... but be prepared to rotate and scale the object, and alter the materials before you save the result as OBJ or FBX. Then that T-Pose can be loaded to mixamo.

MyRemyDefeated.zip
 
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I'm not a member of the tester program and I cannot test it with the new SU
you can. To see if the animations work, we don't need to use variables.
so just make a simple scenaryobject

as I already told you on discord, just try, here is the file ready
And as I already told you my attempt was without variables with a scenery object :) no luck
 
I recap, when I upgraded to version 1.18.3 the characters don't work.
Flags and windsocks work.

I have reverted to version 1.17.3 (very happy) and everything is working.

Fingers crossed to have a version 1.19.3 because I encountered several very nasty bugs and I no longer want to be a beta tester :(
 
* * * *

I find you can't use the stock characters in mixamo. You can download a T-Pose, and then delete the animation in Blender... but be prepared to rotate and scale the object, and alter the materials before you save the result as OBJ or FBX. Then that T-Pose can be loaded to mixamo.
Thanks, Dick, for this alternate work flow using FBX2glTF. That should provide us with a more streamlined work flow in many cases. :)

I did want to clarify something in response your observation above that I highlighted in red. You can actually use the stock characters in mixamo if you follow the steps that I laid out in my earlier post. The Boss character doing the Chicken Dance that I posted is a stock mixamo character. I did not upload him to mixamo. When importing the FBX file of The Boss in Blender, I left the scale at the default of 1. The issue with the data coming into Blender from that FBX file is that the Armature comes in with a scale of 0.01 and a rotation of 90 degrees in the X axis. The underlying Meshes, however, have no scaling and no rotation. So when you break the Parent-Child relation between the Armature and the Mesh, the Mesh looks horribly distorted. But if you immediately change the scale of the Mesh to 0.01 and rotate it 90 degrees in the X axis, so that it matches the transformations of the Armature, then the Mesh looks fine again. At that point, you can make the recommended changes in the NLA editor and can then export to MSFS.

In any event, I think it is great that we now have multiple ways to get animations from mixamo into MSFS.
 
Ok, on our discord seems like we got to a conclusion. For now let's keep @trfsd 's method valid.
It seems that the issue is not "something which has changed" but mainly a bug.
Animations on the beta update seems not to work at all, or almost at all. It picks up some random result which is inconsistent from export method or XML definitions.
Most likely, as me @Kiartz, @salvuz, @mamu and @614NLV tend to believe, Asobo did break something in the sim since NOT EVEN DEFAULT (VANILLA) ANIMATIONS (both SimObjects and Scenery Objects) SEEMS TO WORK, not even on aprons and so on.

I'll suggest to settle the discussion for stable branch of MSFS as @Christian Bahr suggested and get back on topic with SU5 when it releases, to see if Asobo resolves the issue.

Hopefully, we will be able to use the above method to get back on track with our animated stuff once SU5 goes stable
 
I'm having a hell of a time trying to create animated person in MSFS. I would really appreciate any advice. Here's what I did:

1. I created a human figure in Make Human and exported to Mixamo website, where I rigged motion capture to it. So far - so good:


Does anyone know how to do this properly? I mean some scenery producers have figured out animated people, so it is possible. I just can't figure it out! Any advice, tutorials etc.? I'm really desperate at this point...
Yes. I have a process to go from MakeHuman to Mixamo to MSFS.

AngryGretchen

The human is made in MakeHuman, and exported as a T-Pose.

MakeHuman

I import the T-Pose FBX from MakeHuman into Blender to adjust the textures and export as a texture-embeded FBX.

I upload the adjusted FBX to Mixamo. I select the reference points and specify as as '2 chain finger skeleton'. I select an animation, and then export as FBX.

Mixamo

I use FBX2glTF to create a glTF. I then need to make naming adjustments to that gltf and bin file for use in MSFS.

FBX2glTF-windows-x64.exe
 
Yes. I have a process to go from MakeHuman to Mixamo to MSFS.

AngryGretchen

The human is made in MakeHuman, and exported as a T-Pose.

MakeHuman

I import the T-Pose FBX from MakeHuman into Blender to adjust the textures and export as a texture-embeded FBX.

I upload the adjusted FBX to Mixamo. I select the reference points and specify as as '2 chain finger skeleton'. I select an animation, and then export as FBX.

Mixamo

I use FBX2glTF to create a glTF. I then need to make naming adjustments to that gltf and bin file for use in MSFS.

FBX2glTF-windows-x64.exe
Hi, I tried your workflow and basically it works, but my textures don´t show up in Mixamo when I upload the character. I chose "copy" as the Path mode and checked "embed textures" before export to fbx. The size of the fbx file suggests that the textures were exported correctly, but when I upload the character to mixamo I still see the flat shaded materials without textures. Is there a certain way that I have to set up my textures in the shader editor in Blender for them to get exported correctly?

Thanks and Best Regards, Fabian
 
I used OBJ format with the textures in a textures folder in the same location as the MTLand OBJ files I then zip them together and upload the zip file to mixamo. That works for me.
 
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