Exporting a Puppetshop animation to .fbx for Unity

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!