Nozzle Animation Problem / Export problem

[Lite-Brite]

Hello,

 

I have been working on a project lately and have gotten to that point where I need some help with the engine nozzle animation. I have looked through many threads on the DCS forums, but nothing I can find quite relates to my problem.

 

When using bones to animate the engine nozzle, I find that I can argument that animation with a arg scaler, and keyframe the animation. There are no problems there. The problem comes to surface when I try and export. I hit the export button in 3ds to create an EDM and 3ds Max crashes. I just get an error saying "unhandled exception 3ds max will not attempt to save a copy of the scene."

 

Here is a video sort of explaining what is going on with the bones and animation in my project.

 

 

Things I have made sure to do,

1: Put bounding box around object with user defined properties as TYPE = "bounding_box";

2: Keyframe the animation properly to ensure no broken keys or out of place keys.

3: Made sure the envelopes for the bones were not interfering with other parts of the model.

 

TROUBLSHOOTING

 

For troubleshooting I have done just about everything I can think of and it all comes back to one particular piece. The skin modifier. When I delete the skin modifier I can export the model just fine, it turns into an EDM and everything works. So the problem is definitely within the skin modifier, maybe it is a setting or something, maybe I pushed something I was not supposed to, I am not sure.

 

I was just wondering if anyone else encountered a problem like this, or could possibly help me out with the problem.

 

Thank you,

Lite-Brite

[Sn0w_Lynx]

I thought bones were not supported?

[SkateZilla]

Bones are supported, the F-100D uses them to open close the nozzle. and the Animation works in game.

 

 

Lite-Brite, Max usually crashes on export when there is an illegal material assigned (i had issues where i had to re-map everything due to some texture materials using mental ray and stuff.

[Lite-Brite]

Thanks Skate,

 

I actually just ended up redoing the nozzle and just animating every piece individually using precision snaps. I think that it turned out pretty nice too.