I currently have a car I have modeled in 3ds max, and created a bone structure for. The root bone is centered at 0,0,0 with the axis looking in the right direction, and then 4 branches go out from there and connect to each of the wheels. I am having a bunch of issues however trying to get it into unreal engine as an fbx and work with correct physics. Some of the issues I have ran into include:
The vehicle mesh importing with bones, but the wheels are not imported / can not be seen.
- If I attach the wheels physically to the car they import, because they are now a part of the mesh, but this is counter intuitive as now they can not turn.
When the vehicle is imported into unreal via fbx with the bones and wheels attached, just for testing purposes, after rebuilding the physics body, the car roles constantly to the right. I followed the online unreal tutorial very closely that is provided in the documentation, it seems a lot of people have issues with this?
At this point what I am really looking for is a quick, step by step down in dirty of everything that must be done in order to create a new car in 3ds max, just a box with 4 cylanders, rig it, which I am pretty positive I am doing correctly, and then how to get it working in unreal.
I have found a plethora of tutorials from maya and blender to unreal, but can not seem to find any on 3ds max. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance!
For a car, you have a couple options—you can avoid using bones and instead just Link/Attach the wheels to the car and then when you import to UE4 check the Import Rigid Animations option, this will make up its own skeleton and you can import regular object animation. You just have to make sure that there is a single root object that everything else is attached to.
If you don’t go with that method, then you just need to make sure that the meshes are using the Skin modifier and that they are skinned to the bone rig.
Thank you for your quick reply! I will try the link attach method, since the car I need to make does not need to be to complex / utilize suspension or anything of that nature.
So, I was easily able to create a box, attach four cylinders to it and export it into unreal and have it work flawlessly from 3ds max, when I try to do the same exact process with my car model however, it still does not work, the car body is the same as the box from the trial, and the four car wheels are the same setup as the cylinders from the trial, yet when I import this into unreal, with everything be linked, the model throws a huge fit when I try to create a physics asset. Any ideas?
sounds like you moved the pivot of the root bone/mesh it MUST be at 0,0,0 otherwise it goes to pot, just anothr issue we have to deal with on the physics side
make sure your wheels are separated meshes(5 meshes in total)
make sure the car is facing the right axis
the pivot on each tire is in their center
the pivot of the car is on the origin
make sure the car and its wheels are above the ground (Z+)
make sure the size of the car is not small, that causes problems with physics, make sure you are using Centimeters and export the fbx with Centimeters (auto off)
reset xform
to export select ALL the parts and export as fbx 2014