3DSMax bone animation problem

[TurieL]

Hey guys,
I have a problem with displaying an animation that uses 3DSMax ( 8 ) bones. When I export an animation to (skin) .tva and view it in modelview/game engine some (not all) of the bones seem to 'hop around', not exactly where their keys tell them to. I figured out that it happens when the bones do not have basic 3 transformation keys set up (position, rotation, scale) always when we change the one of them. "Hopping" stopped, but the thing is that some bones now slightly changed their initial position when I view the model in modelview :?

And that's only for the begining, it all went "almost" well because I did not link bone systems to other bone systems or objects using max 'select and link' option. When I link them the whole model looks... well, quite different ;] Each vertex changed its initial position to somewhere else The model is stretched and completely deformed.

What up whit' dat?  :?

[AGT]

Have you tried to apply IK chain to the bones! I had the same problem and apllying IK chains solve that!

[TurieL]

Thanks a lot man, it works properly now... well almost because one of the bone systems is still going crazy like changing it's swivel angle for every frame... and there's an IK key for every change on that.
My bad was that not all bones in a system were connected to IK, wich gave me some specific control over it. Guess I'll need to add more IK points on it - I don't like a control like this, but it will have to do.
Well, I'll figure it all somehow from now on.

Thanks!

[TurieL]

Just for your information: I solved the problem with mesh deformation when using bones.

It all happens when you rotate and scale created bones - you change their transformation. It seems that tv3d sets the transformation of the bones to their _initial_ transformarion - to the position, rotation and scale right after you created the bone/bone system. The solution to evade this is to reset bones' transformation and scale using a tool on 3DSMax hierarchy panel.

And why everything is ok when you set up IK? Because then bones are frozen and you animate freshly created IK Chains instead of them ;] Freshly created - no transformation deform  

I hope it will help some animators with this problem around here.

[ladron]

How are you exporting from 3dsmax 8 to .tva format? I thought the plugins only supported up to v7.

[TurieL]

Apparently not - I have plugins for max8

EDIT:
Sorry, to be clear - theese plugins are for max7 But somehow they work in max8.