Been to CGTalk and gotten a bit of up to date info on the situation about the models "blowing up" when exporting to DirectX from LW.
Seems that when you drive a bone hieracy (IK) with
nulls the rotationhandles on the bones looses the rotationdata, hence the limbs goes all whack! The error isn't a faulty weighted mesh (forgotten vertex) but that the bones looks track of their positiondata. Notice that even if it's looks all right in layout, the exported model
still retains the faulty data even
after you delete the nulls.
This only happens if you use IK since the Nulls get's exported with the model. If FK is used and the model animated with the rotationhandles the rotationdata stays intact and the model exports fine. So as long as you doesn't add any nulls to the scene, you should be fine. (Remember that even deleted nulls mess up the mesh.)
The solution is to bake the bones, the DSTORM-plugin has that alternative, but since the nulls has already been added, the model is crap, but there are ways around. Open the general layout and select the bones with animationdata (or all the bones for that matter) and bake them (b-key). This is supposed to bake all animationdata per key/frame but I haven't gotten this to work just yet.
People over at CGTalk are trying to write an automated script to work out the baking-process, animate your model with IK and nulls, bake all bones, delete nulls and then export with your favorite exporter. I'll be back with more info and hints if I find out more.
2,4 Ghz, 512 Meg, gForce FX 5200 - and then some...
