Are Cheetah3D 4.1 Character Animations Unity-Friendly?

I just ordered the Mocca3 upgrade for C4D, when I saw Martin's announcement that the new version of Cheetah 3D supports rigged animation. Do the rigged animations import into Unity? Are Martin and OTEE working on that possibility?

I have an ancient version of Cheetah (circa 200 B.C.), where I first learned 3D modeling. I found it pretty intuitive and easy to use, so Unity-importable character animations via Cheetah3D would be great!

terransage

 

I know that unity does import cheetah3d animations.

They discuss more about it here:
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=4774&highlight=cheetah

 

Ah, thank you, Daniel. I can't believe I missed this. Even though I just got the Mocca update, I'll probably update my Cheetah as well, since I liked it so much. This is great news! 8)

 

I just upgraded to Cheetah 4.1 (yay) and imported a UV-mapped character from C4D (.fbx file) into Cheetah, and all the UV's were preserved (I kept losing them from C4D to modo or C4D to dim3Inspire--not sure why). I haven't tried out the joint animation yet, but I watched the tut video and saw how incredibly fast and easy it is compared to skeletal rigging. When I exported from Cheetah to Unity (.fbx), the UV's were still preserved. A huge vertex weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Thank you, Martin and OTEE (and Daniel for pointing me in the right direction)!

 

As long as Cheetah3D is installed on the same computer, you can also just save native .jas files into your project folder. This is how Unity works with Maya, C4D and Blender works too.

So: No need to export .fbx manually.

d.

 

Thanks, David. Actually, that's what I already do with C4D, save them in Unity as .c4d files. I was just testing whether .fbx files from Cheetah preserve the UV's, because I thought .fbx files were necessary for rigged animation. Am I wrong about that? Do .jas files preserve rigged animation? Well, I'm about to find out right now by experimenting with it.

 

Yes. Unity just automates the .jas -> .fbx conversion behind the scenes.

-Jon

 

Thanks, Jonathon. Yes, I just tested my first .jas rigged animation, and it works pretty well! It took me just about half an hour to learn and test the new rigging/animation system in Cheetah3D, which is pretty amazing. Now I can do epic battle scenes rivaling the Lord of the Rings movies! (Well, at least I can make a character walk, turn his head and wave....)

 

Hi,
Cheetah3D 4.1 should work very well with Unity. v4.0 had some bugs which I ironed out in v4.1. Cheetah3D even supports some FBX features you have to search in many PRO apps like supports for animation takes (clips).
I've already seen some quite nice animated characters done with Cheetah3D in Unity.

The big advantage when using .jas files in Unity is that v4.1 will automatically bake IK animations when unity calls the jas->fbx converter. If you use the manual fbx export you first have to bake IK by yourself.

Bye,
Martin

 

Wow!! I am definitely considering buying a couple licenses of Cheetah. Straight to FBX is a big deal!!

Directly imported into Unity.

THIS IS SHOULD BE FRONT PAGE NEWS ON THE UNITY SITE.

I would guarentee your Unity sales would increase dramatically when people realize they don't have to get Maya(or other expensive app) to directly hook into Unity.

Seriously it should be front page.

 

Lol, that's why I was so surprised when I heard about it from Daniel. The news escaped me completely. My first reaction was: Nah, it can't be true. But it is!

I just rigged a full-blown character using Cheetah, and I did it pretty quickly. I just have to do some of my own tweaking, due to my own modeling sloppiness, but otherwise it's much faster and easier than anything else I've used. Saving poses and separate animation takes is also very easy.

I sound like a walking commercial for Cheetah3D....

 

@Martin: great work! w00t!

@dingo: you realize that posting such ideas here isn't the most efficient way to get our attention if you really feel it's worthy of being a news item, right? If you ever feel that such things ought to make our "news flash" page (and thus appear in the news pod on the right), then please drop us a line and let us know (send 'em to me to keep it easy). But on this one, consider it noted...

We may wait a day or two to let news of the Unite conference settle just a bit and then we'll see about posting up about this great news.

 

Word

Interestingly enough I am a big time Animation Master fan. This will be the first time I am buy a different 3d animation tool in years...

No more 2-3 step pipelines, cheetah to Unity...nice.