3D Max to Blender with Weight

[shinyboy69]

I don't know if posting this in general is ok because I'm asking for some guide about modding and Troubleshooting it is more about core game.

 

Like the tittle of this post: I am an user of 3D Max for more than a decade and I always fail using Blender and understand it with every guide on the internet.

I come here asking for thoughts about using 3D Max for rigging the models and transfer them to Blender.

 

Come here asking for help because I did read several post on Sims4Studio where they act as Blender Church Fanatics where any other program is useless for them and will trash the user who ever mentioned Non-Blender 3D tools.

[Oops19]

There is as far as I can tell not a single program available to exchange data between 3D Max and TS4 (except the one EA might be using which also supports IK targets). So there might be no alternative.

Sims4Studio has implemented an import/export plugin of .package data to Blender.
* The export/import has some issues, bone are rotated to identity while exporting and back-rotated while importing. So in Blender we have the rigs with the proper bone positions but not rotations. This doesn't matter too much when using control rigs to alter the bone positions.
* IK is not supported so one can't create an animation with two sims where sim1 is touching an IK-target of sim2 (within Blender this works fine) and export it like this. All animations are baked statically for one sim so S4S can import them. If sim1 and/or sim2 is smaller/bigger/taller in-game than the animations look odd.
* Rigs must be modified in S4S if one wants to add bones. There is exactly one sim rig, don't think of creating new rigs.
* Some rigs have rotations applied which are not visible in S4S and not exported to Blender. Using such a rig to attach bones yields to very strange results in TS4.

* There are two UV maps in TS4 and this makes modifying of body meshes in Blender not easy. Replacing the mesh without taking into account the UV maps can result in odd visual problems in TS4.
* Weight transfer from one mesh to another works quite good in Blender for TS4.
* One can use Physics in Blender but once again the baked animation will be static. Physics are not supported within TS4.

 

Creating rigs and/or meshes for TS4 may require a lot of work. Simple objects with 3-4 bones are usually not a problem.