Coordinate Transformation (from Opengl/maya To 3ds Max)

[darkkeeper]

Hello,
I have a smooth binded character that is ready for exporting in Maya. The character is needed for a realtime environment that does not use the OpenGL coordinate system. It uses the one, that is similar to 3ds Max. My Maya exporter for the certain file format does not supply any tools for a coordinate transformation. What I need is a way to automatically transform the coordinates of my keyframed animation for all bones.

I tried to simply rotate the root node with -90rotX and exchanged the keys of the Y and Z translation and rotation for the root. Unfortunately that didn't work. What am I doing wrong? Is there a way to let Maya do this?

I recognize that 3ds Max supplies a coordinate transformation when loading .fbx files. Thus, I could also export from 3ds Max to my file format. Yet, my painted vertex weights (done inside Maya) don't show up well in 3ds Max when I export an .fbx that was created with Maya. That's why I thought, a coordinate transformation might be a smaller problem.

Could anyone give some advises?

[drblacksnake]

how bones are animated? through IK or directly?
Hard to see what exactly causes undesirable results without seeing source and destination, so my guess is just to group everything imported, and rotate newly created group by 90 deg
if You want more precise info, then show us more.

[darkkeeper]

Hi,
i've never worked on animations before. So beware my statements

The bones, I assume, are directly animated. The thousands of keyframes originated in free available motion capture data. They were manually refined for perfect cycle matches.

I haven't tried the grouping yet. The problem is that, once I rotate the characters (in a world coordinate system) the keys for certain translation and rotation axes don't change.

Imagine a character walking. The root-node obviously moves up and down in an almost sinus wave. Once I rotate the root by -90

[drblacksnake]

sounds like bones are in wrong orientation. and are you sure you haven't connected rotation curve to translation channel? so you'll get sinetry to understand where is the problem, because we here without seeing what You have are not able to suggest anything You've already tried - swapping axis and rotate.
take a single bone/object e.g. cone and find out in what order You sould connect animation curves of root, to get it move as it must. then compare it to the joints of skeleton and replicate order of actions.
otherwise try different export settings/options.