Inconsistent scale on game engine export

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alejkhan
Posts: 21
Joined: Tue Jun 14, 2016 7:02 pm

Inconsistent scale on game engine export

Post by alejkhan » Tue Jun 18, 2019 5:05 pm

I am trying to export animations to game engine (using it with monogame), but for unknown reasons, they do not export at their original scale or any kind of consistent scale.

I have separate creature projects, but the textures all come from the same scale/resolution photoshop file. When I go to export to game engine, there is the option to change the scale. One image exports approximately its original size when I set the scale to 8.25, but when I used the same settings on another creature project (again, same photoshop file to create the atlas textures for both projects), 8.25 is drastically smaller in scale than the original image (it looks to be more than half the scale). What is going on here? The atlases may be different, but they should have the same relative scale, shouldn't they? Is there a setting I'm missing? Or a bug?

Any help would be really appreciated!

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Inconsistent scale on game engine export

Post by chong » Tue Jun 18, 2019 5:51 pm

Hello,

The creature meshes are actually created in world space which is different from pixel space so the scale will not be the same as your atlas. The atlas is just a texture map on top of the character meshes ( think of it as 3D meshes in Maya with the atlases just being the materials )
I can take a look at making the scaling export match the pixel scaling when I get the cycles but for now, you can set scale up/down the characters however you want in your game engine ( since different game engines also have different notions of how their world is scaled )

Thanks

alejkhan
Posts: 21
Joined: Tue Jun 14, 2016 7:02 pm

Re: Inconsistent scale on game engine export

Post by alejkhan » Tue Jun 18, 2019 6:29 pm

Thank you for your quick reply. We have been setting the scale in the game engine, but we were hoping for a consistent scale across exports to make life easier instead of always having to eye-ball the sizes.

I don't know if this would help, but can you tell us what your scale/units are in the world space you are using?

In any event, it would be very awesome to have the export scale match the pixel scale, so we would have known numbers to work with.

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Inconsistent scale on game engine export

Post by chong » Tue Jun 18, 2019 6:39 pm

Hello,

I believe to aid in the mesh authoring ( and make sure other rigging + animations operations go through in Creature since we are dealing with meshes in world space ), the atlas is scaled down proportionally with the shorter side down to a reference scale of 1.0 and the longer side being whatever it is relative to the shorter side. You can see this yourself in Creature when you import an arbitrary image ( or texture ) in meshing mode. Creature in this aspect is much more similar to 3D applications like Maya, Houdini, Max where we treat the atlas as a texture for mesh + rig character setups.

Thanks

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Inconsistent scale on game engine export

Post by chong » Mon Jun 24, 2019 3:51 pm

Hello,

Actually I just realized you can do one more thing to help match your character scales:

Image

Please look at the image above. Every character in Creature can have its global scale set by clicking on the rulers in Rig Mode. You can also inspect its global widh/height in Rig Mode. Hence, what you can do to make your character scaling consistent across all characters is to scale them appropriately using this method in Rig mode. That should help you in your current scaling issue(s).

Cheers

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