In this tutorial I show you my workflow to get a Puppetshop animation into the Unity Engine. Quite some steps are necessary for a successful export and I hope the provided images will make it easier for you to follow this tutorial. Intermediate knowledge of 3ds Max is required.

We're starting with exporting the Puppetshop animations as default 3ds Max bones and saving them into single files:

1. Make sure the meshes (the character itself, clothing, etc.) you want to export are linked to the Puppetnode and neither frozen, nor hidden.
2. Select the Puppetnode and go to File => Mocap Advanced.
3. Press Export => As Max Bones and click Yes in the duplicate skinned meshes dialogue.

Puppetshop exported your character as default 3ds Max bone hierarchy and baked all animation onto them. By default the exported root bone is now selected.

1. Select the Bones and the duplicated skinned meshes and Save Selected.
2. Name the file like this: character[at]animation.max (e.g.: char_monster[at]attack01.max)
3. Hit delete to remove the Max Bones and duplicated skinned meshes

Repeat the above steps for all character animations. Next we're going to export the single animations as .fbx files so we can import them into Unity:

1. Open your clean animation file (only Max Bones + Character Meshes)
2. Make the start of the animation range 1 frame earlier. If your animation went from frame 1 to 100 it should now go from 0 to 100.
3. Select all objects (Ctrl-A) and draw a selection around all the keys on the first keyframe - delete them. If your animation went from 1 to 100 you should delete all the keys on frame 0.
4. Now change the range of your animation back to the initial values. Taking the example from before it should now be 1 to 100 again.
5. Export it as FBX with these settings:
6. Animation => Deformations => Skins on
   
   
7. Advanced Options => Units => Scale Factor => Millimeter
8. Advanced Options => Units => Axis Conversion => Y-Up
   
   
9. Export it

If you have any additions or corrections you think should be included in this tutorial, please mail me!

Your muscles constantly work to keep your body in balance. We will try to emulate this by adding noise to our animations. It's an easy way to make your animations feel more natural, similar to adding noise to a clean rendering which yields a more pleasing, photography-like result. Good controllers or objects for adding noise are the puppet root, head, chest and hands.

How to add noise to an animation

1. Create a new animation layer for your noise
2. Select the bone you want to add noise to (e.g. the puppet root)
3. Open the Puppetshop trackview
   
   
4. Select the track you want to convert to a noise track, e.g. the X Position track (a)
5. Got to the menu Controller => Assign... (b)
6. Select the Noise Float (c) controller in the popup to replace the original Bezier Float controller
   
   

How to transfer the generated noise onto other animations

1. Select the Noise Layer of your animation
2. Select another animation you want to apply the noise to
3. Go to Puppetshop's Layer advanced rollout
4. Go to Duplicate Layer From and chose the animation with the noise in it from the dropdown
5. Shift click on the Add button to copy the layer instead of instancing it
6. Check the animation and see if it still loops seamlessly
7. If not, create a new layer and activate Auto Key Mode
8. Copy the starting pose to the end of your frame range

As Kees announced in this forum post, Puppetshop is now available for free with support and development continuing as usual. Puppetshop is a very powerful rigging and animation plugin for 3ds Max.

Tags: News Plugin 3ds Max Puppetshop Animation

Update:

The 2.0.1 release didn't work for me, even after tweaking the advanced settings. Better get the 2.1.b2 beta release, works like a charm for me.
Joomlapack 2.1.b2
Joomlapack 2.1.b2 documentation

An easy and fast way to backup your complete Joomla installation (including the database) is JoomlaPack. Installation and usage are very easy and straight-forward. After the installation you can find JoomlaPack in the Components menu

You can directly fetch the current stable release 2.0.1 here:
http://joomlacode.org/gf/download/frsrelease/9146/34054/com_joomlapack-2.0.1.zip
http://joomlacode.org/gf/download/frsrelease/9146/34055/documentation-2.0.1-pdf.zip

The winners of the Crunchies Award 2008 were finally announced. Check them out: http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/

The Crunchies award celebrates the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.